The Influencing Mechanism Of User Involvement On User Loyalty In Online Tourism Community

Recently, online tourism community has been one of the hotspots of international tourism research. For example, it is regarded as an important discussion issue in the 17th European Conference on Information Systems in 2009.Yet despite the importance and implication of online tourism community, the easy transferability of Internet users makes user stickiness generally not high in online tourism community. Based on this, this paper uses online tourism community as background and self-determination theory and consumer four-level cognitive structure model as theory basis. What's more, this article combines semi-structured interviews and scenario-based questionnaire method to deeply investigate the influencing mechanism of user involvement on network user loyalty. Specifically, the present study aims to address the following three questions: (1) If user involves more is better? (2) If user involves more means involving deeper? (3) What kinds of unique factors will affect the relationship between user involvement and network user loyalty?In order to correspond to the research background of online tourism community, the two unique perspectives of service personal values and sense of virtual community are chosen as entry points to try to open the influencing black box of them on the relationship of user involvement and network user loyalty. In addition, this study uses scenario-based questionnaire method and the two dimensions of user involvement are manipulated. The design is a 2 (breadth of user involvement:high vs. low)+2 (depth of user involvement: high vs. low) between-subjects factorial design with 4 scenarios. Moreover, in order to improve subjects' understanding of the scenarios and make the differences among these scenarios more significant, first of all, we conduct a semi-structured interview with 11 staffs online and offline, who are abundant with experience of using online tourism community. And then we select 19 graduate students to conduct twice pre-experiments before the formal questionnaires are conducted.This results show that:(1) breadth of user involvement has significant inverted "U" type influence on network user loyalty, while depth of user involvement has positive influence on network user loyalty. (2) Sense of virtual community has significant moderating and full mediating effect between breadth of user involvement and network user loyalty, however, it doesn't have significant moderating but has partial mediating effect between depth of user involvement and network user loyalty. (3)Service value to peaceful life, service value to social identity and service value to social integration have partial mediating effect between user involvement and network user loyalty. In short, this research not only finds a better and new explanation for user loyalty, but also provides a new pathway for travel enterprises to improve the innovation performance by means of user involvement. Therefore, there are some advices for tourism enterprises that they should timely guide users to participate, strengthen users' influence and reinforce fans marketing according to different types of users.