Turkish Gen Y Customers’ Visit Intentions and Word of Mouth Activities Regarding Online Travel Agencies

Yigit Sebahattin Bozkurt and Emel Yarimoglu ()
Additional contact information
Yigit Sebahattin Bozkurt: Adnan Menderes University
Emel Yarimoglu: Yaşar University

A chapter in Strategic Innovative Marketing and Tourism, 2020, pp 475-482 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Tourism industry in Turkey has been developing dramatically. Adapting online technologies to tourism industry have become inevitable and travel agencies have started to transform their brick and mortar businesses to click and mortar, even click-only businesses, since they prefer to be accessible everywhere in the world. Online travel agencies have become popular alternatives during online travel planning and booking. Consumers can only get information from online travel agencies or they can buy from these websites. The aim of this research was to analyze the characteristics of Gen Y customers’ internet usage, and show the relationships between word of mouth activities regarding online travel agencies and visit intention to online travel agencies. Within this aim, the questionnaire was created and conducted in Izmir City with 240 Gen Y customers chosen by convenience sampling technique in April, 2017. Descriptive statistics, factor analysis, and regression analysis were used in data analysis. Findings showed that 81.7% of customers preferred shopping from the internet and 82.5% of customers preferred booking a hotel online. As a result of factor analyses, one dimension arose for visit intention to online travel agencies and one dimension was obtained for word of mouth construct. To test the hypothesis, regression analysis was implemented to the constructs and it showed that word of mouth explained 49.3% of variance in visit intention to online travel agencies. Results showed that Turkish Gen Y customers were open to use online technologies in tourism industry. It was suggested to travel agencies to use online channels and pay attention to word of mouth activities of their customers for increasing visit intention.

Keywords: Generations; Gen Y; Online travel agencies; Visit intention; Word of mouth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spr:prbchp:978-3-030-36126-6_53

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030361266

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-36126-6_53

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().