Exploring the Role of Social Media Travel Influencers on Gen Z's Tourist Satisfaction: A Study Among Twin City University Students

Abstract

Travel and tourism sector is expanding in Pakistan. Earlier for gaining information on trips, traditional methods like travel agencies were acquired. However, with the arrival of social media, the transition is now towards influencers who create travel based content. Travel influencers on social media are playing a key role in promoting tourism digitally just by creating content through their videos. With little research on this topic specifically in the context of a developing country like Pakistan where the tourism sector can have a lot of influential impact on the economy of the country, this study investigates how social media travel influencers impact Generation Z’s (Gen Z’s) tourist satisfaction among Twin City University students. Application of uses and gratification theory has been done to examine how Gen Z satisfy their travel needs by consuming travel influencers content. The study examines information seeking needs, entertainment needs, visit intention and electronic word of mouth (E-wom) as a source of satisfaction. This research has employed a quantitative survey approach and a questionnaire was adapted to assess Gen Z's tourist satisfaction influenced by social media travel influencers' content consumption. To evaluate the research hypothesis, data was collected from 850 students from the 4 famous universities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. The universities included Nust, Islamic International, Arid and Fatima Jinnah to include both co and non-co institutes. This was based on Multi-stage sampling in which selection of cities was based on convenient sampling, selection of universities was done on purposive sampling while selection of Gen Z students was done on simple random sampling. The results were analyzed using the software SPSS. Findings reveal that there is a significant impact of social media travel influencers on Gen Z’s tourist satisfaction which evidently supports and accepts the hypothesis generated. The study further has lots of implications and scope for the tourism field and provides a lot of insights and understanding for the tourism industry and organizations.