The purpose of this paper is to address the following question: How does information quality affect trust in content providers, destination image and choice?
A multidimensional model is developed with seven constructs. Stimulus-Organism-Response model has been adopted to develop a theoretical foundation for the research. After the validation of measurement scales, hypotheses are contrasted through structural modeling to evaluate the model fit and estimate the model coefficients. The model was examined empirically using a sample of 429 followers of Iran’s fam-trips who had followed them in the Instagram. The followers were required to complete an online survey regarding their information resources and the information quality achieved from the Iranian fam-trips.
The results of this study suggest that destination information quality provided by fam-trips in Instagram has a significant and positive influence on trust in destinations, cognitive image, affective image and unique image. Additionally, cognitive image, affective image and unique image were found to be significantly associated with overall destination image. Furthermore, overall destination image and trust in content providers were shown to have a powerful effect on destination choice.
This paper is one of the first to develop and empirically test a structural model to indicate the mechanism of tourists’ decision-making in the context of fam-trips.
