Crisis Communication with the Traveling Public on Social media

The current study utilized partial least squares structured equation modeling to explore the relationship between digital opinion leadership, perceived uncertainty, and travel intention. Based on the literature, we argue that opinion leadership of an information source, such as a destination management organization, could determine how travelers perceived the information’s credibility and quality, mitigating their perceived uncertainty. Limited research has examined the role of opinion leadership in mitigating perceived uncertainty for travelers under crises, especially in the context of social media. Its exploratory analysis was unable to confirm a significant path between opinion leadership and perceived uncertainty. However, the study suspects a possibility of uncaptured effects due to the study not observing differences between source types and platforms. Opinion leadership of certain sources The future steps of this study will delve deeper into the data collected to examine the influence of social media platforms and source types.