The impact of social media influencers on travel decisions: the role of trust in consumer decision journey

TLDR

Social media influencers increasingly shape travel consumer behaviour, and trust is essential for sustaining successful long‑term relationships between tourism firms and consumers. The study applies customer journey theory to examine how trust in SMIs influences travel decision‑making and mediates through desire, information search, evaluation, purchase, satisfaction, and experience sharing. Using customer journey theory and Smart PLS, the authors model how SMI trust affects each stage of the travel decision process. Analysis shows that trust in SMIs positively influences every stage of travel decision‑making, with each step mediating the effect on the next, creating a spillover throughout the journey, and highlighting SMIs’ role in stimulating desire and information search to drive destination choices.

Abstract

The growing presence of social media influencers (SMIs) is increasingly modulating consumer behaviour in the travel industry. Trust is a vitally important topic in influencer and tourism marketing and is responsible for creating and maintaining successful long-term relationships between organizations and consumers. This study uses customer journey theory to explain the impact of SMI trust on customer travel decision-making and focuses on evaluating the role of customer journey constructs (including desire, information search, evaluating alternatives, purchase decisions, satisfaction and experience sharing) in mediating the interrelation between SMI trust and the dimensions of customer journeys. Using Smart PLS to analyze the data collected, the results indicate that consumer trust in SMIs has a positive effect on each phase of travel decision-making. Moreover, each step of the decision-making journey mediates the trust effect on the next step, having a spillover effect on the whole journey, implying continuous SMI input. Tourism marketers are advised to use SMIs to increase and stimulate the desire to travel as clearly, a means by which consumers search for information about their next journey. Besides SMIs as a marketing tool, their trustworthiness serves as a highly important aspect to successfully influence tourists' destination decision making.