Social media engagement and fear of travel: a premium hotel case study

The aim of this study is to understand how risk perception and fear of travelling affect social media interactions in premium hotels' reservation process. Tourists are increasingly using social media to gather reliable information for their travel judgements. Thus, this work specifically focuses on how these tourists' decision-making process is moderated by their risk perception. The results of a process model, based on the analysis of data from an online survey with 1,279 responses, show that brand attitude mediates the positive relationship between social media engagement and reservation intention and that fear of travelling, acting as a proxy variable of high-risk perception, moderates this relationship. Thus, as their high-risk perception increases, tourists actively engaged with a hotel brand via social media increase their reservation intention. The main findings in this study therefore strengthen extant knowledge of social media users' behaviour and comprise an effective tool for managing crises in top-tier hotels.