Exploring the Social Media Effect on Tourist's Engagement, Relationship and Customer Care

Social media has taken over almost every sphere of a man's world; ranging from socialisation, to business, to networking, to marketing and the like. No industry has remained untouched by the influence of social media. In today's fast pacing world, tourism offers recluse to the modern man looking for relaxation and unwinding stress. Marketing with the advent of social media has seen a paradigm shift towards relationship management and engagement. In the present time and era, people are tech savvy and well informed thanks to electronic word of mouth, hence social media offers great opportunities to both tourists and travel firms for a meaningful exchange. Co creation and mutually benefiting relationships attract attention towards social media marketing. This paper aims to explore how an Indian tourist feels about the eWoM on social media and if it helps in engaging them, building a relationship with the Tourism brands and allows them a complaint redressal through social media customer care. Seeking theoretical support of the Social Exchange Theory, a conceptual framework is built and empirically tested using PLS-SEM on 204 Indian Tourists.