Turkish Gen Y Customers’ Visit Intentions and Word of Mouth Activities Regarding Online Travel Agencies

Abstract

Tourism industry in Turkey has been developing dramatically. Adapting online technologies to tourism industry have become inevitable and travel agencies have started to transform their brick and mortar businesses to click and mortar even click-only businesses since they prefer to be accessible everywhere in the world. Online travel agencies have become popular alternatives during online travel planning and booking. Consumers can only get information from online travel agencies or they can buy from these websites. The aim of this research was to analyze the characteristics of Gen Y customers’ internet usage and show the relationships between word of mouth activities regarding online travel agencies and visit intention to online travel agencies. Within this aim the questionnaire was created and conducted in Izmir City with 240 Gen Y customers chosen by convenience sampling technique in April 2017. Descriptive statistics factor analysis and regression analysis were used in data analysis. Findings showed that 81.7% of customers preferred shopping from the internet and 82.5% of customers preferred booking a hotel online. As a result of factor analyses one dimension arose for visit intention to online travel agencies and one dimension was obtained for word of mouth construct. To test the hypothesis regression analysis was implemented to the constructs and it showed that word of mouth explained 49.3% of variance in visit intention to online travel agencies. Results showed that Turkish Gen Y customers were open to use online technologies in tourism industry. It was suggested to travel agencies to use online channels and pay attention to word of mouth activities of their customers for increasing visit intention. © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.