Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Social media has provided a new practice in every corner of our life. The utilization of social media in travel planning has been increasing in Asia. There is an escalating tendency among travelers to utilize this opportunity. Besides this, social media also plays an important role in travelers’ decision making. To understand the traveler’s behavior from different cultures, a cross-cultural study was conducted to examine Chinese and Bangladeshi traveler’s preferences. This investigation focused and compared on the use of social media for travel planning phase (before travel, during travel, and after travel) based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory. The study confirmed that Chinese and Bangladeshi travelers have different cultural tendencies to use social media for travel purposes. Using survey data from China and Bangladesh, results revealed that travelers from both countries prefer social media essentially before travel phase and there are significant differences between social media consumption and content creation during travel and after travel. It is very important that, although Bangladesh is listed as developing country very recently (May 2018), but the using social media platform is also popular same like as China. In this stage, government and non-government travel marketers of Bangladesh can increase social media strategies to enlarge online tourism services.