The purpose of this article is to study the influence of the online travel community on tourists' attitudes toward their domestic destination and travel intention among Thai travelers. The results show that the most important factors of Thai travelers over the age of 18 that have a significant positive relationship with travelers' travel intention are source credibility and attitude towards the domestic destination. In Thailand, the study and research on the effect of online travel reviews on tourists' attitudes toward domestic travel and travel intention among Thai travelers are insufficient.
LITURATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESIS DEVELOPMENT
Literature Review
- Online Travel Communities (OTC) and Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) in Tourism Industry
- Attitude toward Destination
- Travel Intention
Social media websites accelerate the spread of eWOM information, surrounded by a huge amount of people; and users can even share their opinions by forwarding only the messages they correspond with. Recently, marketers can also post information through their official accounts on social media websites (Alboqami et al., 2015). Therefore, people who encounter eWOM on social media need to extensively critique the information in order to use it for ideal purchase intentions.
Hypothesis Development
Information usefulness refers to people's perception that using new information will improve his/her performance (Bailey & Pearson, 1983). Information usefulness is considered a main predictor of information adoption and purchase intention because people tend to engage with the information when they find it useful. Dennis, Merrilees, Jayawardhena, and Wright (2009) added that a positive attitude toward an e-retailer positively influenced e-consumers' intention to make a transaction.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
- Research Design
- Population Size and Sample Size
- Sample Characteristics
- Quantitative Design
- Research Instrument
- Constructs Measurements
- Questionnaire Design
- Data Collection
- Data Analysis
Nevertheless, the convenience and random sampling is selected to use in this study to eliminate the selected unit due to the availability and accessibility (Sekaran and Bougie, 2009). The respondents must be Thais over 18 years of age, as the purpose of this study is to investigate the important factors influencing the intention to travel domestically. The quantitative research is used as a tool to study target respondents in order to understand them better about the impact of factors that affect domestic travel intentions, the researchers have often used quantitative research to measure the construct and the hypotheses (Sekaran and Bougie, 2009) .
This article uses the quantitative method to quantify the travel behavior and domestic travel intention of Thais over 18 years old. This study uses an online questionnaire survey from GoogleForm.com with the questions that provide information from respondents. Information from online travel reviews helps me reduce the dangers that can arise from traveling.
To analyze the data, this research uses the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20.0 software to test the hypotheses in order to test the constructs that have been tested and reviewed on the topic of factors affecting domestic travel. In this research it will be divided into 4 parts with the sample size of this study 293 respondents. Descriptive analysis is used to describe personal information including age, gender, personal monthly income level of the respondents.
One-way ANOVA analysis is used to measure respondents' age, gender, marital status, number of children, and income towards the intention to take domestic trips.
RESEARCH FINDINGS
- Result and Analysis
- Demographic of Respondents’ Information
- General Respondents’ Information
- Analysis of Variance ANOVA
- Gender
- Income
- Education
- Marital Status
- Factor Analysis
- Total Variance Explained
- Scree Plot
- Rotated Component Matrix
- Multiple Regression Analysis
- ANOVA Result of Running Multiple Regressions
- Model Summary of Running Multiple Regression
- Coefficients Result of Running Multiple Regressions
It can be concluded that different age has no influence on the travel intention of Thai travelers to the domestic destination. It can be concluded that the difference in gender has no influence on the travel intention of Thai travelers towards the domestic destination. It can be concluded that the change in the highest level of education has no influence on the travel intention of Thai travelers to the domestic destination.
It can be concluded that different marital status influences the travel intention of Thai travelers towards domestic destination. From Figure 4.1, the Scree plot showed a picture of 5 important number of constructs that contributed to this influencing Thai travelers' intention to travel domestically. In this study, Table 4.9: Rotated Component Matrix showed that there are 5 dimensions which influence Thai travelers' intention to travel domestically.
The results are regrouped after running the factor analysis explored in the rotated component matrix, which factor analysis in this study can answer the factor influencing the intention of Thai travelers to go on domestic travel. Combining the new variables and determining the correlation between the independent variables and the dependent variable to measure the factors influencing Thai travelers' intention to go on domestic travel. After factor analysis showed the regrouping of significant factor analysis, which are eWOM, source credibility, information usefulness, destination attitude, and time spent on online travel review, tested with Thai travelers' attitudes toward destination domestic travel.
From multiple regressions, the score of Thai travelers' attitude towards domestic travel intention is used as a dependent variable with the set of independent variables (usage, trustworthiness, information usefulness, eWOM and attitude towards domestic destination). The result in Table 4.11 of the summary Model of 5 constructs towards domestic travel intention of Thai travelers illustrates that the adjusted r square was equal to 12.3%. Then, testing the coefficient of 5 factors with Thai travelers' attitude towards domestic travel intention explained the significant factors while running the Multiple Regression.
Hypotheses Summary
In this research, ANOVA and Multiple Regression methods were used to test hypotheses to describe the relationship with all variables. On the other hand, there were 3 hypotheses that were rejected due to the statistical results, which are H1 (eWOM), H3 (Usefulness of information), and H5 (Time spent on online travel community).
Discussion
Although sample characteristics and data analysis tools are different, but this study revealed the similar result. The author aimed to see the influence of online travel community on Thai travelers' attitude towards domestic destinations and their domestic travel intentions, as attitude has the power and ability to predict behavior. Therefore, the sample characteristics of this study are different from the previous studies as it targeted Thai travelers over the age of 18 who traveled in the past six months, while the previous studies focused on the international tourists who visited their countries.
It confirmed that source credibility has a positive effect on domestic travel intentions and a positive attitude towards the domestic destination has a positive effect on domestic travel intentions. The result of this research confirms the hypothesis model, finds additional reliable attributes of eWOM from previous research and supports the research hypotheses H2 and H4, which show that source credibility has a positive effect on domestic travel intention. This result is similar to the research by McCroskey et al. 1958), which showed that receivers respect and accept the message more when the communicators have high credibility.
Also, the finding of this research is similar to Morgan, Pritchard and Piggott's (2003) research, which strongly influences the image of the destination by disparaging WOM, in which dissatisfied tourists share unpleasant and disparaging comments about their experiences. This is also supported by Zhu and Lai's (2009) study, which found that the amount of information in WOM and consultations is positively related to actual tourist acceptance and can be interpreted as a rational evaluation of WOM information in terms of attributes (i.e., reliability, integrity, competence and quality assurance) related to the product, service or destination.
CONCLUSION
- Conclusion
- Recommendations and Practical Implications
- Limitations
- Future research
Therefore, it shows that Thai travelers tend to travel based on content that appears in the online travel community and comes from a reliable source. This research examined the effect of an online travel community on Thai travelers' domestic travel intention attitudes. To answer the second research question, which asked "Does online travel community have a positive influence on Thai travelers' destination attitudes and travel intentions?", a hypothesis test was conducted.
In particular, the direct effects have a stronger correlation, such as between online travel community and travel intention, online travel community and tourists' attitude and tourists' attitude and travel intention. As the travelers share their experience with each other on online travel community, DMO and tourism industry need to understand their behavior and the influence of virtual communities that generate word of mouth towards probability tourists. This research attempts to investigate the influence of online travel community on the process of a choice of domestic tourist destinations.
After the trip, they will share their experience in the online travel community, which can increase the destination's exposure online. This research focused only on Thai traveler respondents who have traveled in the past 6 months and have experience in seeking information from online travel reviews. Finally, the research purpose in this research, this paper focused on observing the effect of online travel community on domestic destination attitude and travel purpose among Thai travelers.
For the future research, the next researcher can include additional target respondents such as those who do not travel often or the consumers who prefer to buy package tour to compare the effect of online travel community on their attitude and travel intention.
The influence of eWOM in social media on consumers. purchase intentions: An extended approach to information adoption. A tourist behavior model. 2012) The effect of electronic word of mouth on brand image and purchase intention. Social media marketing in the hospitality industry: The role of benefits in increasing brand community participation and the impact of participation on consumer trust and commitment toward hotel and restaurant brands.
Mohammad Reza Jalilvand, Neda Samiei The influence of electronic word of mouth on the choice of a tourist destination: Testing the theory of planned behavior (TPB)", Internet Research, vol. social networking site. Journal of marketing The influence of content generated by users on traveler behavior: An empirical investigation of word-of-mouth effects of online hotel bookings.
APPENDICES
Appendix A: Questionnaire
Positive online comments in the review about traveling in Thailand make you want to go there. 33. After reading the online travel review, I may visit that destination in the review instead of another destination.
