Ontology-driven insights into the transformative role of social media: a qualitative study

Purpose Social media have become essential in the hospitality industry as they alter how guests search, discover, and collaborate on information regarding accommodations, ultimately affecting the way they make decisions about hotels online. These digitally mediated interactions also influence travelers’ trust, emotional engagement and experiential expectations before actual travel takes place, reflecting certain dimensions of transformative tourism. It is still unclear how social networking usage and its impact will affect how travelers choose which hotels to remain at, even though social media’s influence across a wide variety of sectors has been fiercely debated. While previous studies have explored influencers, reviews, and advertisements separately, limited research has examined their combined influence on Gen Z hotel selection behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to look into how the internet influences Gen Z’s choices of hotels. Design/methodology/approach The study used a qualitative method to investigate how customers make decisions in the hotel industry, with a particular emphasis on the evaluation phase and the influence of social media. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 27 participants who were born between 1996 and 2010 and actively used social media platforms while making travel-related decisions. The responses collected through open-ended questions were later analysed using thematic and ontological analysis to understand the relationship between social media influence and hotel selection behaviour among Gen Z consumers. Findings The study used ontological analysis to further get insights into the role of social media influencers, user-generated content and advertisements in shaping Gen Z’s decision for hotel selection. The findings further revealed that influencers, online reviews and visual storytelling significantly shape Gen Z travelers’ trust formation, authenticity perception and hotel booking intentions. The collected data indicates that social media and hotel websites provide helpful information for consumers when selecting a hotel, and that advertising on social media can influence consumer decision-making. The data also suggests a strong correlation between the amount of information available and consumer decision-making, as well as between social media advertising and accommodation selection. The ontology-driven analysis also helped in understanding the interconnected relationships between different digital touchpoints and hotel booking behaviour among Gen Z consumers. Originality/value This study contributes to the growing discussion on transformative tourism by showing how social media platforms reshape tourism perceptions and digitally mediated hotel selection behaviour among Gen Z travelers. This study presents useful concepts to professionals in the hospitality industry by showing the effect of online platforms on intricate choices during the process of selecting a place to stay.