Effects of psychological distance and social influence on tourists’ hotel booking preferences

ABSTRACT

Standing out in the tourists’ hotel booking process is important for hotels in today’s competitive environment. To effectively promote hotels, it is necessary to have a deeper grasp of the factors affecting tourists’ hotel choices. To this end, this research examines the effects of psychological distance (temporal and spatial) and social influence on tourists’ hotel booking preferences based on the Construal-Level Theory (CLT). Social influence is identified as a moderator between psychological distance and tourists’ booking preferences; whole perceived message quality is identified as a mediator. The paper concludes with theoretical implications, practical implications, and ideas for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Hotel booking
• booking preference
• psychological distance
• temporal distance
• spatial distance
• social influence
• Construal-Level theory
• perceived message quality
• experimental design
• hotel marketing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hainan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China [721QN223].