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Social media plays a critical role for both travelers and tourism companies (Chung & Buhalis, 2008; Ye, Fong, & Luo, 2021). Instead of resorting to official company websites, consumers are increasingly turning to social networking sites (SNS) pages to search for any relevant information, including travel-related tips (Mehraliyev, Choi, King, 2021). Nowadays, suggestions from friends and family, online recommendations, as well as online comments influence travelers' decisions for planning for a trip (Berhanu & Raj, 2020). SNS allow travelers to share their experiences and ideas with others. SNS provide easily accessible forums on which travelers may share their personal information, experiences and ideas with others and leave their comments, reviews, opinions and suggestions about airlines, hotels or restaurants (Hur, Kim, Karatepe & Lee, 2017). As information from SNS comes from a large number of users every day, it can be difficult to quickly differentiate reality from fiction or actual news from mere opinions (Johnson & Kaye, 2014). According to Sunny Tsai and Rita Men (2013), to support consumers’ engagement with SNS, the credibility of information provided by both brand developers and consumers on SNS pages is an essential element for establishing trusting relationships with consumers (Pop, Săplăcan, Dabija, & Alt, 2021). Similar findings regarding trust in news in social media were also reported recently (Karlsen & Aalberg, 2021). Perceived online credibility is defined as the extent to which one perceives information to be believable and this is considered as a strong predictor of consumer’s further action (Li & Suh, 2015) and decision making (Alrubaian, Al-Qurishi, Alamri, Al-Rakhami, Hassan, & Fortino, 2018). Prior research has reported how to judge the information credibility on traditional media or websites (Metzger & Flanagin, 2013). However, information on social media platforms suffers from a lack of professional gatekeepers who can monitor content (Li & Suh, 2015), leading to the presence of some fake news in social media (Abdallah, 2021). It is not unusual to find unverified or false information flow on social media (Di Domenico, Sit, Ishizaka, & Nunan, 2021). In this situation, online consumers are forced to look for new ways to evaluate the credible information.
Although past research has examined the use of social media for travel-related purposes (Varkaris & Neuhofer, 2017; Rahman, Sharmin & Akhter, 2021), scant attention has been paid to how perceived credibility of information on SNS influences consumers’ intention to adopt such information in purchasing decisions, specifically in the hospitality marketplace (Li & Suh, 2015). Since consumers can access services indirectly and form a degree of trust of a service provider through online interactions with both a company and other customers (Daugherty, Eastin & Bright, 2013), it is expected that SNS can also play a vital role in consumers’ intentions to adopt and act on information on SNS. Although previous research has attempted to investigate antecedents that drive consumers to visit or follow SNS information (Daugherty et al., 2013), more research on a larger and more diverse sample which is applicable to a variety of SNS is needed to aid understanding of consumers’ perceived credibility of information concerning SNS and how this affects their intention to adopt it (Li & Suh, 2015).