Our research explores the consumers’ process of investigating holiday-related offerings information online in three corresponding stages: information search, evaluation, and purchase.
Our research finds that consumers purchasing high-involvement products such as
holidays are more likely to be influenced by eWOM than previously examined.
First, we find that seeking UGC content plays a dominant role in this process, responding to calls from previous research (Black & Kelley, 2009; Papathanassis & Knolle, 2011; Xie et al., 2011).
Second, we find that eWOM importance is greater for first-time purchases than for repeat purchases.
Third, we find that consumers also seek information from a wider variety of
sources – provider, UGC, and WOM, and involve opinions of people other than the person actually paying for the tourism product.
Some actively seek provider and UGC information, whereas others are more passive, reading only what is presented to them.
Fourth, we demonstrate the use and sequence of information sources retrieved.
These findings are important in understanding the consumer journey and at
what stage a potential consumer may either gain or lose interest in the product.
Fifth, we find that images have a pervasive influence on the users of provider and UGC information.
Sixth, we find that the effects of positive eReviews are greater and are more likely to impact the purchase decision than those of negative reviews.
However, negative eReviews are read in more depth than positive eReviews and are also perceived to be more credible.
Our research can be applied to tourism companies and our framework provides a basis for exploring service failure and recovery by identifying varying behavior during different stages.
Finally, our findings indicate that the eWOM definition may be expanded to include
images, as images were found to be an exceptionally important influencing factor in the customers’ decision to purchase.
This seems even more relevant today because “a picture speaks a thousand words”, with consumers taking pictures of almost anything, and therefore this should be reflected in existing eWOM definitions