Consumer engagement and place identity in online travel forums

The quest to understand the formation and management of relationships between a firm and consumers in online contexts represents a priority for both researchers and practitioners. Consumer engagement is central to furthering such understanding and encouraging satisfaction, commitment, and trust, as popular enabling variables. Recent calls to broaden and deepen consumer engagement nomological networks motivate the current study, which aims to include place identity (PI) as a promising feature. Because it is integral to individual self-identity, PI could provide a stable, enduring complement to attitudinal constructs. Amos 25 was used to analyze survey data from 250 online travel consumers in Taiwan, and the results reveal that PI fully mediates the effects of engagement, commitment, and satisfaction on loyalty intentions; in particular, it explains an additional 24% of the variance in this outcome. The effects of consumer engagement and PI on satisfaction and loyalty, respectively, also grow significantly stronger at low levels of consumer trust. Taken together, these findings establish the important, unique role of PI for facilitating loyalty intentions in online travel contexts.