DETERMINANTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA USE ACROSS TOURIST LIFECYCLE PHASES - AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF TOURIST MOTIVES

Abstract

Social media has now emerged as an essential tool for tourists looking to not just plan their next vacation but also to use it during their vacation and beyond. This paper has brought to the fore, the motives behind the use of social media as a tool by tourists during the three phases of the tourist lifecycle; Pre-trip, In-Trip and Post-trip. From the primary data collected from domestic and international tourists, the motives that influenced their use of social media across the lifecycle phases have been identified using factor analysis and the relative importance of these factors have been analysed. Knowledge and understanding of these factors will enable destination marketing organizations and other tourism providers to utilize social media as a marketing tool to influence the tourists’ travel planning.