Research On The Influence Of User's Perceived Factors Of Online Travel Community On Customer Engagement

The emergence of social media platforms provides spaces for tourists to gather online to communicate and interact around tourism topics,and thus online travel communities have emerged.The online travel community gathers a large number of current/potential customers and rich user-generated content,which is an important field for firm to carry out relationship marketing and co-create value with customers.However,the customer-firm relationship in the online travel community has not received sufficient attention from the academics.Customer engagement is an emerging hotspot in the marketing field,used to study the psychological connections between customers and firm and a series of non-purchase behaviors.This paper introduces customer engagement into the context of the online travel community,and studies the the impact of the users' perceived factors of the online travel community on their customer engagement,and provide theoretical support for the online travel firm to carry out relationship marketing activities for users.This paper sorts and arranges relevant literature through literature analysis,summarizes the research status of online travel community and customer engagement,focus on the academic disputes on the definition of customer engagement,and the feasibility of applying customer engagement to the context of online travel community,to provides a foothold for this research.With the relevant concepts analyzed and defined,the customer engagement is divided into customer engagement attitude and customer engagement behavior.And base on the basic characteristics of online travel community,the dual roles of online travel community as a service system where tourists obtain information and as a social space where tourists interact with each other online are discussed.Therefore,perceived usefulness,perceived ease of use and sense of virtual community are selected as independent variables.Base on the social exchange theory and technology acceptance model,a conceptual model of user perceived factors affecting customer engagement is constructed,and the theoretical hypotheses of this paper are proposed.The analysis data of this paper was obtained through online and offline questionnaire survey.The sample data was statistically analyzed by SPSS22.0 and AMOS22.0 to verify and correct the research model.The research conclusions of this paper show that customer engagement attitude has a significant positive impact on customer engagement behavior;perceived usefulness has a positive impact on customer engagement attitude and customer engagement behavior,and can indirectly affect engagement behavior through engagement attitude;sense of virtual community has a positive impact on the customer engagement attitude,and indirectly affects the engagement behavior through the engagement attitude;the perceived ease of use has no significant effect on the engagement and engagement behavior.Finally,based on the conclusions of empirical research,this paper puts forward corresponding suggestions on how online travel firm can promote the formation of customer engagement in online travel community.At the end,the shortcomings of this research and the prospects for future research are pointed out.