Factors Affecting Pre-Travel Planning of Families Netnographic Study of Facebook Group “The Travel Diary”

The aim of this research was to identify which factors are taken into account when families – with children or elderly parents – are planning to travel. To understand what these factors are, the Facebook group “The Travel Diary” was observed. For this study, the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) was chosen as the theoretical framework. Existing literature has also utilized TPB to study the factors that affect travel. However, the broader themes (under which these factors are categorized) have only been analyzed individually. The focus of this research is to study as many broader themes holistically as possible to gain deeper insights. Additionally, previous research has mainly gathered data through structured interviews. The current research, on the other hand, employed netnography in order to observe online community members to gather authentic, unobtrusive data. The themes that arose from the eight-week observation were traveler characteristics, travel characteristics, destination characteristics, travel arrangements and sources of recommendations. Some factors that, to the best of the researcher’s knowledge, have not been studied yet in literature were food related and baby related arrangements.