“Not all travel videos are equal.” Examining the effects of short travel videos on travel intentions and electronic word-of-mouth

Abstract

Although short-form videos are treated as an effective marketing tool for destinations to attract potential tourists’ attention, what characteristics of short travel videos stimulate potential tourists to involve in destinations and the influence of users’ inertia behavior of viewing short travel videos on its promotion efficiency remains poorly studied. Thus, this study put forward a conceptual model to investigate the power of content novelty of short travel videos and parasocial relationships on users’ involvement behavior and explored the moderating role of inertia between involvement and users’ travel intentions. Partial least squares (PLS) path modeling was applied to evaluate the linkage between variables, in which 212 valid questionnaires were collected via private messages to users who commented on or posted relevant short travel videos. Data results revealed that content novelty and parasocial relationships significantly influence users’ involvement behavior, further predicting travel intention and electronic word-of-mouth. Inertia behavior negatively moderates users’ intention to travel; their browsing behavior primarily serves as a means of passing time, but they do nothing significant. The findings provided a novel viewpoint on the existing destination marketing literature in short travel videos by testing the interactive role of inertia with involvement. Further implications will be discussed below.