Cultural Dimensions and Social Media Empowerment in Digital Era: Travel-Related Continuance Usage Intention

Abstract

In this digital age, technological advancements have dramatically transformed consumers′ travel behavior. Among these, social media has been identified as the most notable and popular digital platform which appeals to consumers from different cultures, mindsets, and demographics. Culture may stimulate individuals’ attitudes and subsequent behavior. Thus, prior research concentrated on technology adoption in the cross-cultural perspectives, rather than the influence of technological empowerment in an individual context. The significance of the cultural dimensions in shaping behavioral patterns of travel consumers has long been recognized, but the topic remains understudied. Moreover, the usage of social media has seen exponential growth in popularity, but little research has incorporated cultural values at an individual level, mostly for travel purposes. Hence, this current study aims to examine cultural values and their impact on social media continuance usage intention from a travel viewpoint. Therefore, an integrated framework is proposed, grounded in the technology acceptance model (TAM), and extended by cultural values (i.e., collectivism, long-term orientation, and uncertainty avoidance), and social media self-efficacy. A cross-sectional data survey (n = 346) was conducted on travel consumers and a structural equation modeling (SEM) was carried out. Results show that collectivism and long-term orientation are significantly linked with the perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness, which influences the social media continuance usage intention, whereas uncertainty avoidance does not have any relevance. Moreover, social media self-efficacy significantly (though indirectly) affects the continuance usage intention via perceived usefulness. From our findings, travel providers are encouraged to follow the cultural effects and individuals’ continuance usage intention while providing tourism services on social media. The theoretical and practical implications of these results have also been an area of focus of this paper.