The Effect Of Electronic Word-of-mouth On Tourist Decision Making

With the rapid development of Internet,tremendous changes have taken place in the area of tourism information dissemination.A variety of tourism websites provide massive tourism related information for tourists.Meanwhile,the tourism industry has entered into a new era of foreign independent tourists,leading to a stronger dependence on tourism information.Among all kinds of information,the electronic word-of-mouth(e-WOM)has a significant effect on tourist decision making behaviors.Generally,tourists think e-WOM is more reliable than information offered by tourism service providers.Also,e-WOM can effectively stimulate tourist demands.Through literature review,we can see that researchers both at home and abroad have paid much attention to the subject of how electronic word-of-mouth affects tourist decision making behaviors.They have explored many factors from the perspective of information itself,information publisher,information reader and information publishing platform.Among the four factors,information itself is mostly discussed,while little attention is paid to other factors.Besides,most current research explored the direct effect of electronic word-of-mouth on tourist decision making,few research take the tourist perception variable into consideration as a mediator.Therefore,this paper constructed a comprehensive theoretical model including four electronic word-of-mouth factors and the tourist perception variable.The main purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of e-WOM information quality,information visual cue,publisher expertise,publishing platform expertise,tourist perceived risk,information search effort and tourism knowledge on tourist decision making and the mediation effect of tourist perceived usefulness and perceived credibility.Also,the effect of tourist demographic characteristics and publishing platform types on tourists’ evaluation of each variable is discussed.Data was collected by questionnaire and SPSS20.0 was used in statistical analysis process.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)The direct effects of information quality,publisher expertise,tourist perceived risk and information search effort on tourist decision making are significant,among which information quality has the strongest effect and publisher expertise has the weakest effect.Information visual cue,publishing platform expertise and tourism knowledge don’t have significant direct effect on tourist decision making.The perceived usefulness and perceived credibility have direct positive influences on tourist decision making and the former one plays a more important role.(2)Some electronic word-of-mouth factors can exert indirect influences on tourist decision making via the tourist perception variable.Information quality and publishing platform expertise have direct positive effects on perceived usefulness and perceived credibility,leading to indirect effects on tourist decision making.Tourist perceived risk and information search effort directly affect perceived usefulness,leading to indirect effects on tourist decision making.Publisher expertise,information visual cue and tourism knowledge have no indirect effects.(3)Perceived usefulness works as a mediator in the relationship between information quality,tourist perceived risk,information search effort and tourist decision making.Perceived credibility works as a mediator in the relationship between information quality and tourist decision making.(4)The effect of electronic word-of-mouth on tourist decision making is affected by sex and income.Female tourists are more easily affected by e-WOM than male and low income tourists are more easily affect by e-WOM than the average income.Tourists’ evaluations of electronic word-of-mouth are indifferent for different types of publishing platforms.