Engaging Travellers in the Context of Tourism SMEs: A Conceptual Paper

Abstract

Social media (SM) provide opportunities for businesses and customers for collaborative engagement with each other. Studies have found that SM has a positive influence on the engagement of businesses with customers. On the contrary, evidences showed that it is viewed as an irrelevant platform to engage customers. Thus, the role of SM in engaging customers remains unclear, especially in the context of small medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In addition, SM as an enabler of customer engagement was not well researched in the tourism context. The aim of this paper is to understand the use of SM to engage travellers in the context of tourism SMEs. This paper proposes an exploratory qualitative research using a five-stage research framework for theory development on a research design consisting of five stages: (i) pre-understanding, (ii) exploration of concepts, (iii) framework development, (iv) framework development and refinement, and (v) framework finalization. This study aims to develop an in-depth and advanced understanding of SM customer engagement and tourism SMEs. Additionally, the study provides implications in highlighting how tourism SME industry can lead develop customer engagement strategies, improving performance both domestically and globally