온라인 관광 구전정보품질이 구전효과에 미치는 영향

The Internet has established itself as the most powerful grassroots channel in every field of information search, which is no exception for the tourism scene. While in the past commercial travel agencies, industry experts, or specialized magazines and books were among the primary sources for travelling information, today the use of the Internet has allowed one to look for and collect information from more various references. Further, travellers themselves, as active providers as well as users, are able to more effectively and freely acquire, express, and exchange useful information and opinions through various channels online. In general, word-of-mouth information is more influential because of its high reliability as the pure one without commercial intentions compared to other information source. Moreover, in the case of tourism products, with the difficulty involving in verification of their reliability as well as their characteristic of having higher perceived risk, they are shown to have relatively heavier reliance on word-of-mouth information. In the online contexts where facial contacts lack between information senders and receivers, rather than their personal information, characteristics of the word-of-mouth message itself are in place as more important criterion for assessment of information value. Drawing from previous literature, this research derived consensus, vividness, accuracy, timeliness, and playfulness as online tourism word-of-mouth characteristics, thereby exploring how they influence word-of-mouth effects via credibility and usefulness. The findings revealed that the four word-of mouth characteristics, except for consensus, had positive impact on credibility and usefulness, which in turn significantly affected word-of-mouth effects.