Abstract:
Social media marketing activities are the most important concept related to purchase intention in the digital era. In relation to the hotel industry, social media marketing activities impact consumers’ booking intention is different. Therefore, this study investigates the impact of social media marketing activities on consumers’ booking intentions in the hotel industry in the Western province, Sri Lanka. This study is deductive and quantitative in nature, and it has employed a structured questionnaire for data collection. Questionnaires were distributed online, and 360 valid responses were collected as primary data from a sample, which was identified through a convenience sampling technique. This research found that social media marketing activities and its dimensions, namely entertainment, interaction, trendiness, e-WOM, and customization, significantly positively affect the consumers’ booking intention in the Sri Lankan hotel industry. Results showed that the dimension of e-WOM value is a better predictor of booking intention than other dimensions of social media marketing activities. The study’s findings can be utilized to improve the Sri Lankan hotel industry’s social media marketing activities. This research study’s main limitation is that although there are many social media platforms that hotels can use for their marketing activities, only the Facebook platform is concerned in this study. To better understand the role of social media marketing activities, further research is required on users of social media in certain geographical markets on various social media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube.
