What Will Motivate You To Travel After COVID-19?: The Effects of Online Social Identity, Social Comparison, Conspicuous Consumption, and Self-construal on Choosing a Tourist Destination

• Author / Creator

  Cho, Seung Jin

• Background: From the outset of the COVID-19 crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic had devastating impacts on the tourism industry. However, the number of tourists seemed to recover in the summer of 2021 and even surpassed 2019 arrivals. Tourism practitioners and marketers should better understand and predict new trends in the tourism industry and prepare for the post-COVID-19 era. A strong desire for “revenge tourism” was forecast by tourism observers, where tourism demand would sharply rebound after the exhausting and protracted period of lockdowns and travel restrictions. Recent research suggests that young adults (e.g., 18 to 34-year-olds) report higher social media usage compared to the pre-COVID-19 era, indicating that they may develop a higher level of online social identity. This new phenomenon could lead social media users to engage in increased social comparisons and conspicuous consumption, especially in tourism contexts. The psychosocial mechanism that ultimately leads to conspicuous consumption behavior was examined to comprehend the decision-making process and motivations for choosing particular tourist destinations.
  Objectives: The purpose of this research was to investigate if online social identity induces social comparisons among social media users and thus influences the decision-making process of choosing a tourist destination from the perspective of conspicuous consumption. This research also examined the possibility of tourists from different ethnic groups (i.e., East Asians and Westerners) being more subject to social comparisons and conspicuous consumption.
  Methods: To better understand tourists’ motivations to travel, two surveys were utilized to first identify the conspicuousness of international tourist destinations and then statistically analyze why tourists choose to visit the conspicuous destinations. Survey One was distributed to students and employees at the University of Alberta (N = 54) to determine the conspicuousness of each international tourist destination, and Survey Two was distributed to a new set of participants (N = 321) in Canada to measure the levels of online social identity, self-construal, social comparison, and conspicuous consumption. All the participants in this study belonged to the age cohorts of Millennials and Generation Z. Path analysis was used to analyze the psychosocial motivators that galvanize consumers into choosing a conspicuous tourist destination.
  Outcomes: Survey One showed that of the top 20 international tourist destinations, Paris, Dubai, and Rome were identified as the most conspicuous destinations, while Delhi, Denpasar, and Ho Chi Minh were found to be the least conspicuous destinations. Based on the findings in Survey Two, online social identity and the emotional outcomes generated by social comparison (i.e., benign envy and hubristic pride) played significant roles in galvanizing people into engaging in conspicuous consumption and intending to visit conspicuous destinations. Furthermore, materialistic hedonism and ostentation, which are the two dimensions of conspicuous consumption, had mediating effects on the relationship between the intention to visit international conspicuous destinations and its predictors. There was no significant difference in the level of intention to visit conspicuous destinations between East Asians and Westerners, although East Asians intended to visit inconspicuous destinations more than Westerners. Ethnicity moderated the relationship of the intention to visit international conspicuous destinations with the two dimensions of conspicuous consumption, interpersonal mediation and status demonstration. When East Asians engage in interpersonal mediation and status demonstration, they are more likely to intend to visit international conspicuous destinations than Western people. As a result, in the post-COVID-19 era, depending on each international destination’s level of conspicuousness, social media-based envy-and-pride-eliciting marketing strategies should be engaged to attract Millennials and Generation Z, which are the two age cohorts that are substantially influenced by social media.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Conspicuous consumption
  • Social comparison
  • Self-construal
  • Online social identity
  • Tourism
  • Leisure studies

• Graduation date

  Fall 2022

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-mzas-4r59

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Library with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.