Social Media and Transformation of Consumer Behavior in Tourism

Social media enjoy an exceptional accomplishment in terms of acceptance and its uses for different purposes. Although sufficient efforts have been made to discover social media’s application in consumer behavior for purchasing travel services from a different perspective, the usage of social media during different phases of travel starting from pre-trip to post-trip stage remains imprecise. Hence, the present chapter intends to fill this gap by identifying social media uses on consumer behavior in different phases of travel. The chapter is based on qualitative techniques to study and discover the different aspects of consumers’ social media uses during the travel process and its effect on consumer behavior. The discussion with experts and reviews of websites, social media, and digital platforms related to the tourism and hospitality sector were accessed for the accomplishment of the aims of the chapter. The chapter noticed that consumers had extensively used social media during all the traveling process stages to make a purchase decision start from the response, and these end in the information sharing. From the analysis, it is detected that social media uses in travel decision making have a significant impact on consumer behavior and used extensively in information exchange, flexibility to adopt this dynamic technology, searching and discovering information related to travel. Moreover, several practical implications can also be drawn from the study from the perspective of professionals in the field of tourism.