A Study of the Tourism Consumers' Acceptance of Electronic Word-of-Mouth-A Case of Travel Accommodation

With the coming of Information Age, the Internet becomes a significant tool and source for the public to search for information. The development of tourism, in such a flourishing environment of information technology, has gradually changed. Electronic word-of-mouth (EWOM) has become an important source of information for consumers. However, because of the anonymity of EWOM, EWOM received by consumers may be with credibility problems; hence, in order to have a better understanding of the relevance between consumers' travel accommodation reservation and the EWOM acceptance, the researcher adopts the approaches of literature analysis and questionnaire survey to gather related information as the basis for analyzing the relevance. The present study recruited consumers who have ever searched for travel accommodation and had tourism-related consumer behaviors as participants. Through the questionnaires set on Google website, the researcher collects 525 effective (valid) questionnaires in total. The results of the study show that the relationship between the consumers' capability of using the Internet and their involvement of tourism products on the acceptance of EWOM is significant and positive partly. Under Multiple Regression Analysis, the three features of EWOM have a significant and positive impact on the consumers' acceptance of tourism products the degree of influence of EWOM is importance> interaction> appraisal. Based on the above results, it is known that there is a positive and significant difference in the consumers' acceptance of EWOM because of the consumers' capability of using the Internet and the involvement of tourism products. The EWOM also affect the acceptance of the consumer.