Social Support and Commitment within Social Networking Site in Tourism Experience

More and more tourists are becoming active members of social networking sites (SNS) and are tending to use SNS during different trip stages. Thus, SNS use allows their members to find a great variety of tourism information; share experiences by posting various pictures, photos, and blogs; tag photos; and read and leave comments on network friends’ posts. By getting tagged in a friend’s photos or getting some positive comments, the tourists using SNS can perceive social support from both friends and other network members, and obtain positive emotions triggering from maintaining relationships with family members and close friends or sharing opinions and ideas with people with similar interests. All this can change and shape the satisfaction with tourism experience of the tourists. This study aims to fill the gap in understanding the relationship between SNS use and satisfaction with tourism experience by exploring the effect of psychological factors caused by SNS use on tourists’ experience. More specifically, this research attempts to investigate the mediating effects of perceived social support, positive emotions, and commitment. The statistical results show that SNS use positively affect satisfaction with tourism experience by mediating positive emotions and commitment and perceived social support, and commitment also positively influences satisfaction with tourism experience by mediating positive emotions. With these results, this study extends the research stream of tourism experience by figuring out the mediating role of positive emotions caused by SNS use. Additionally, these findings provide some practical implications regarding marketing techniques that use SNS to increase satisfaction with tourism experience of tourists