Revista de investigación turística y hotelería

An Impact of Social Media and Online Travel Information Search in Vietnam

Vi Tuong Tran, Huong Hue Do, Ngoc Vu Nhu Phan, Tu Ngoc Nguyen and Nguyen Van Trang

An Impact of Social Media and Online Travel Information Search in Vietnam

Abstract
Social media is increasingly prevalent among and beneficial for travelers. A large percentage of travelers use search engines when it comes to making travel-related decisions. In addition, social media websites which appear on the search results are becoming preferable information sources to travelers. In Vietnam, numerous customers (83%) use search engines before making ground travel purchase decisions and over one fifth of the population, which is equivalent to 19.6 million, is currently Facebook users. Therefore, the goal of this research is to investigate the role of social media presented by a search engine within Vietnam trip planning context. The research employs a set of selected searching keywords together with ten Vietnam urban destination names in order to unveil the information searching for travel planning. The findings show to some extent that social media websites can help display searching results, and how certain types of social media websites are distributed across the result pages in online tourism domains. Implications for online marketers targeting Vietnamese audience are also mentioned.