Digital Tourism Behaviour in Emerging Markets: A Principal Component Analysis of Online Information, Engagement and Travel Activity

This study examines the structural relationships among key digital behaviour indicators in emerging European countries, focusing on how digital information use, social media engagement, online purchasing, informational search interest and domestic tourism activity align at aggregated level. A secondary dataset from Eurostat and Google Trends for the year 2024 was analysed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to identify latent behavioural dimensions. The results reveal two distinct components. The first integrates digital information use, online purchasing, informational travel search interest and domestic tourism activity, forming a functional, decisionoriented digital behaviour dimension. The second isolates social media engagement as an independent pattern, indicating that general social media use reflects communication and entertainment-driven behaviours rather than functional trip-related actions. These findings highlight the multidimensional nature of digital engagement in tourism and demonstrate that different forms of digital behaviour do not necessarily evolve together. The study offers a consolidated macro-level perspective on digital tourism behaviour and outlines directions for future research.