Buttressing social return’s influence on travel behaviour

ABSTRACT

With peer perceptions of vacation pictures on social media becoming firmly entrenched into the tourist psyche and the destination selection process, this paper buttresses the burgeoning research on social return’s influence on travel behaviour through additional theoretical development and empirical investigation. The paper assesses the cross-cultural construct and predictive validity of the Social Return Scale across the United States of America’s top-five international travel markets (Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom, Japan, and China) using a modified Theory of Planned Behaviour model grounded in Guttman’s means-end chain model and Kenrick’s Fundamental Motives Framework. Results confirm the scale’s superb validity providing researchers with the theoretical and empirical support to confidently utilize the Social Return Scale to measure the perceived social return of different travel experiences across different contexts and cultures.

KEYWORDS:

• Social return
• symbolic consumption
• social media
• cross-cultural validity
• multi-group confirmatory factor analysis
• theory of planned behaviour

Disclosure statement

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