Tourist’s Group Knowledge Representation and the Role of E-Wom for the Choice of Tourist Destination

Abstract

This paper provides a conceptual representation to explore the tourist’s group knowledge investigating the influence of group variables and the role of e-word-of-mouth communication on decision making process. Augmenting organizational behavior approach we illustrate a conceptual proposal for improving the current tourist’s knowledge representation through integration of one important level of analysis: the group. Despite, we integrates also the constructs e-word-of-mouth communication in the conceptual proposal. The findings of this research support the development of tourism marketing and communication strategies focused on the online contexts as factors capable of influencing tourist’s behaviour in a more efficient way. This research does not focus on a specific tourist’s destinations, thus the presence of different destinations may affect consumers in different ways, according to their involvement towards to a particular destination. This study contributes to deepening the scientific debate on the tourist’s destinations. In the past literature, many aspects of tourist behavior have been neglected. One of these aspects is exactly the study of tourist’s group behavior that is the original focus of this paper. Keywords: group’s dynamics, tourist’s group knowledge, decision making process, e-wom.