Assessing the influence of social media feedback on travelers’ future trip-planning behavior: a multi-model machine learning approach

With the surge of domestic tourism in India and the influence of social media on young tourists, this paper aims to address the research question on how "social return" - responses received on social media sharing - of recent trip details can influence decision-making for short-term future travels. The paper develops a multi-model framework to build a predictive machine learning model that establishes a relationship between a traveler's social return, various social media usage, trip-related factors, and her future trip-planning behavior. The primary data was collected via a survey from Indian tourists. After data cleaning, the imbalance in the data was addressed using a robust oversampling method, and the reliability of the predictive model was ensured by applying a Monte Carlo cross-validation technique. The results suggest at least 75% overall accuracy in predicting the influence of social return on changing the future trip plan. Moreover, the model fit results provide crucial practical implications for the domestic tourism sector in India with future research directions concerning social media, destination marketing, smart tourism, heritage tourism, etc.