| The Internet has become an important channel for tourism organizations to conduct destination marketing in the context of the deep involvement of information technology in the lives of the general public.The prosperity of social media has given rise to travel vloggers who rely on social platforms to share their personal travel experiences,tips,reviews and other contents.They are active on social media platforms,gaining large numbers of followers that not only trigger customer engagement behaviors such as “like,”“share,” and “subscribe,” but also influence tourists’ visit intentions.However,there has been less research on travel vloggers as key tourism influencers on social platforms.Tourism marketing organizations confront the difficulty of unclear criteria and high marketing costs when building their social media presence or working with travel vloggers.There are also challenges for travel vloggers to improve their ability to attract and monetize traffic.The reason is the lack of recognition of the power resources that travel vloggers have in social media,the lack of understanding of the relationship between users and travel vloggers,and the lack of comprehension of users’ online behaviors,which leads to ineffective market positioning.Therefore,it is both theoretical and practical to explore the relationship between various power resources of travel vloggers,the relationship between tourists and travel vloggers,and tourists’ online behavior and visit intention.This research proposed a model based on PSR theory that included seven dimensions of tourism vloggers’ attractiveness,prestige,expertise,parasocial relationship,consuming engagement behavior,contributing engagement behavior,and visit intention,and it also suggested 17 related hypotheses.Optimize items by conducting reliability and exploratory factor analysis on 193 pre-test questionnaires before forming the official study questionnaire.The study used questionnaires to collect data from travelers who viewed travel vloggers’ videos on Chinese social media platforms between August and November 2022.The survey collected 691 responses,503 of which were valid.For confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation model testing,the paper used SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 26.0.The data showed that the model fits well,and its reliability and validity met the standard.The results indicate that(1)the attractiveness,prestige,and expertise of travel vloggers are significant antecedents of parasocial relationships;(2)parasocial relationships are antecedents of tourist consuming engagement behavior,contributing engagement behavior,and visit intention;(3)tourist consuming engagement behavior and contributing engagement behavior influence tourist visit intention positively and significantly;and(4)parasocial relationships mediate between travel vloggers’ attractiveness and tourist consuming engagement behavior,as well as between travel vloggers’ attractiveness and tourist contributing engagement behavior,and also mediate between travel vloggers’ attractiveness and tourist visit intention.Parasocial relationships mediate between travel vloggers’ prestige and tourist consuming engagement behavior,as well as between travel vloggers’ attractiveness and tourist visit intention,moreover,parasocial relationships mediate between travel vloggers’ expertise and tourist-consuming engagement behaviors,as well as between travel vloggers’ expertise and tourist contributing engagement behaviors,and they also mediate between travel vloggers’ expertise and tourists’ visit intention.Based on the findings,it is proposed that,when implementing a social media influencer marketing strategy,it is necessary to highlight the power resources of travel vloggers,such as attractiveness,prestige,and expertise,and to promote the development of parasocial relationships between tourists and travel vloggers;to stimulate tourist engagement behaviors such as “follow,” “like,” and “comment,” to increase tourists’ visit intentions and improve traffic realization ability.Based on parasocial relationship theory,this research constructs a research model of travel vloggers’ influence on tourists’ visit intention,which enriches the study of tourism vloggers’ persuasion effect.From a practical standpoint,the study provides new perspectives for tourism organizations’ destination marketing,travel vloggers’ commercialization,and social platform business design by analyzing the relationship between travel vloggers’ power resources and tourists’ visit intention. |
