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Attitudes of MBA Students Towards Social Networking Sites for Online Travel Related Activities

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Tourism and Culture in the Age of Innovation

Abstract

Nowadays, the use of Social Networking Sites (SNS) is becoming indispensable. On SNS people provide authentic information about their travels, gained through personal experience and when they interact over a long period of time they trust the opinions of their ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ and take them into consideration when making a purchase decision. The paper aims at investigating attitudes of MBA students towards SNS use for travel activities. It takes into consideration four popular SNS, namely Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google +. Fishbein model was used for the evaluation of students’ attitudes. The findings reveal that MBA students use SNS for getting socialized with other travelers and companies and informed about tourism destinations/companies/travel. Facebook is the most popular Social Networking Site for travel activities except from the professional reasons (e.g., search for job in the tourism sector), in which LinkedIn comes first.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank ‘MBA in Hospitality and Tourism’, Technological Education Institute of Central Macedonia for Finance.

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Correspondence to Dimitrios Paschaloudis .

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Paschaloudis, D., Koukidou, E., Kottas, A., Saliaka, K. (2016). Attitudes of MBA Students Towards Social Networking Sites for Online Travel Related Activities. In: Katsoni, V., Stratigea, A. (eds) Tourism and Culture in the Age of Innovation. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27528-4_35

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