Effects of socialization interactions on customer engagement in online travel communities
ISSN: 1066-2243
Article publication date: 14 June 2019
Issue publication date: 14 November 2019
Abstract
Purpose
Travel companies are increasingly hosting online communities to extend their initiatives of customer relationship management and gain additional insight into their business. While the benefits to companies from hosting online communities are clear, another closely related issue has not been given comparative attention: Why do customers engage voluntarily in online travel communities? The purpose of this paper is to answer the question by developing and testing a conceptual model that exploring the influence of socialization interactions on customer engagement with the community.
Design/methodology/approach
Hypotheses were tested by applying structural equation modeling based on survey data collected from an online travel community (n=665).
Findings
The results supported the research hypotheses and demonstrated that socialization interactions (i.e. information and social exchange) in the online travel community are important catalysts for customer engagement.
Originality/value
The contribution of this study is twofold. First, from a theoretical perspective, it offers new insights into the conceptualization of customer engagement and its antecedents in the context of the online travel community. Second, from a pragmatic perspective, the conceptual model derived from this research aids practitioners in stimulating customer engagement from the perspective of socialization interactions.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the internal grant from Beijing Information Science and Technology University (No. 1935003), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71272018; No. 71740017; No. 71802025), the National Key R&D Plan of China (No. 2017YFB1400400), the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (No. 17YJC630107), and the useful suggestions by the editor and reviewers.
Citation
Luo, N., Wang, Y., Jin, C., Ni, Y. and Zhang, M. (2019), "Effects of socialization interactions on customer engagement in online travel communities", Internet Research, Vol. 29 No. 6, pp. 1509-1525. https://doi.org/10.1108/INTR-08-2018-0354
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited