What does the audience care? The effects of travel vlog information quality on travel intention

AbstractAlthough travel vlogs have recently been adopted as digital marketing tools to promote tourist spots, relatively little is known about which attributes of travel vlogs and how these attributes motivate audiences to travel. This study emphasizes the importance of information conveyed by the content of travel vlogs and aims to explore how the information quality (information usefulness, ease of use, and comprehensiveness) in travel vlogs affects audience travel intention through presence, enjoyment, and flow experience. The partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) is adopted to analyze data collected from 241 respondents who had experience with watching travel vlogs. The results indicate that the three facets of information quality positively influence travel intention through the mediating role of presence, enjoyment, and flow experience. The total effect of information comprehensiveness on travel intention is the strongest, followed by information usefulness and ease of use orderly. The findings extend the literature on travel vlogs by validating the role of information quality in travel vlogs. In line with this, travel vlog creators are suggested to pay attention to information management when making vlogs.Keywords: travel vlogsinformation qualitytravel intentionpresenceenjoymentflow experience Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Authorship contributionXiaorui Zhou: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.Jose Weng Chou Wong: Conceptualization, Supervision, Writing – review & editing.Dengming Xie: Conceptualization, Software, Visualization, Data Analysis, Writing- original draft.Rongying Liang: Data Collection.Lingrui Huang: Data Collection.Notes1 https://www.xiaohongshu.com/protocols/about2 https://www.statista.com/topics/9269/online-video-content-creators/#topicOverviewAdditional informationFundingThis work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 72262009]; and the Guangxi Natural Science Foundation [grant number 2021GXNSFAA220066].