earticle

영어

Development of social network services(SNS) is changing tourism marketing fundamentally, overcoming the limitations of traditional mass media channels and providing small tourism organizations with effective and economic marketing channels. Despite the significance, existing literature on tourists’ SNS posting behavior is still in the early stage where many researchers relied on the technology acceptance model to emphasize the technological reliability and informational satisfaction. As the SNS use reaches a full acceptance stage, many technological factors are losing its significance in determining SNS intentions, and understanding the characteristics of tourists and travel experiences is gaining large academic attentions. Contributing to this new research direction, this paper adopts a theoretical perspective of memorable tourism experiences(MTEs) and investigates its influence on the SNS posting intentions based on a survey of rural family tourists in South Korea. The MTEs are a set of cognitive and emotional variables that promote memory of tourist experiences. Tourism studies have confirmed its theoretical significance in a variety travel contexts and developed highly valid and reliable measurements. This study proposes an integrative model to show that the combined MTEs factors have a positive and significant impact on SNS posting intention of rural family tourists. Furthermore, to compare the significance of different cognitive and emotional factors, this study proposes a discrete model that discusses the influence of individual variables. The result of statistical analysis shows that three sub-dimensions of MTEs, such as arousal, refreshment, and meaningfulness experience, have positive and significant impact on SNS posting intentions. This paper theoretically contributes to tourists’ SNS posting studies and offers important implications to tourism marketers and rural travel managers.