Sustainable attitudes: Protecting tourism with inoculation messages

Bobi Ivanov, Lindsay L. Dillingham, Kimberly A. Parker, Stephen A. Rains, Molly Burchett and Sarah Geegan

Annals of Tourism Research, 2018, vol. 73, issue C, 26-34

Abstract: This study explored the potential of inoculation messages to protect the pro-destination attitudes of potential tourists. As this study argues, much research has focused on the promotion of destination images, sustainable tourism, and more recently the impact of Tourism 2.0 (i.e., hyper connected, multidimensional consumer knowledge sharing across social media platforms) on the industry. Yet, little attention has been given to communication strategies designed to pre-emptively protect tourist attitudes from negative online peer reviews. Therefore, via a three-phase experiment the current investigation explored the impact of different (i.e., no message, supportive, and inoculation) communication message strategies on tourist pro-destination attitudes when faced with a negative peer review of the destination on social media. Results indicate that for participants exposed to negative peer reviews presented via social media inoculation messages protected pro-destination attitudes better than other message types.

Keywords: Destination image; Inoculation; Social media; Sustainability; Tourism marketing; Persuasion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160738318300914
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:anture:v:73:y:2018:i:c:p:26-34

DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2018.08.006

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Tourism Research is currently edited by John Tribe

More articles in Annals of Tourism Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().