An Examination of Social Networking Sites as Search Tools on the Tourist Destination Decision-making: An Empirical Research with MCDM Approach

Abstract

Social Networking sites (SSNs) have proliferated rapidly in the last few years and continue grow in popularity. With this rapid of grow, SNSs are playing an increasingly important role as information sources for travelers. Besides that, tourism is the fastest growing industry, the golden industry, therefore, not only the marketing expert, manager, but also a lot of researcher want to know about the tourist’s decision-making. This study used a decision making and information search model of SNSs as a framework for explaining the factors which influence to travel destination decision making of tourist. The purpose of this study is to address this issue using a hybrid MCDM (multiple criteria decision-making) approach that includes the DEMATEL (Decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory), DANP (the DEMATEL based analytic network process) method to achieve a optimal solution Along with examining decision-making propositions from literature, this study covers important issues in need of resolution for making advances in understanding, describing, and predicting tourist decision-making. This research analyzes the antecendents of tourist decision-making on Social network sites to chose a destination which classified into six dimensions, namely tourist characteristics, destination characteristics, internal search, external search, planning characteristics, and choice set which have proposed by recent studies. This research confirms the interdependent relationships of antecedents and their rank of priority. Therefore, this study found that external search was the most important dimension. This research finding reveal a pattern behind the decision-making process of tourist – social network user, enabling researcher to see how tourists make their decision-making to chose a destination. This research finding also enable researcher to understand the underlying characteristics behind the decision-making and then providing researcher a new perspective on the contribution of the decision-making process.