Puzzling out characteristics of ewom inducing vietnamese millennials’ possibility of booking hotels via online travel agency sites

Puzzling out Characteristics of Ewom Inducing Vietnamese Millennials’ Possibility of Booking Hotels via Online Travel Agency Sites Vuong Thao Nguyen Tran Tien Khoa Nguyen Van Phuong International University, Vietnam National University HCMC, Vietnam Abstract This paper aims to puzzle out factors contributing to the proposed set of hypothesized relationships inducing perceived electronic worth-of-mouth (eWOM) credibility and purchase intention of Vietnamese Millennials when seeking for hotel reviews on Online Travel Agencies’ (OTAs) site The study uses a quantitative approach throughout surveying 365 correspondents in social network sites from February to April of 2018 The findings illustrated that booking intention of Vietnamese Millennials was affected mostly by source trustworthiness Some notable peculiarities in research findings due to the potential differences in nature of OTAs’ site have contributed to the debate of existing eWOM literature Specifically, the current findings not only enrich understanding of factors inducing perceived eWOM credibility but also benefit marketers by providing preliminary recommendations in approaching Vietnamese Millennial eWOM receivers, also known as the most potential consumers, on OTAs’ platform via credible eWOM initiatives Keywords: electronic worth-of-mouth; eWOM; online travel agency; eWOM credibility; Vietnam hospitality industry; Vietnamese Millennials JEL codes: D91, M, Z3, Z32 Introduction Undoubtedly, the rise of internet and internet applications have enabled people to easily share information, experiences, and thoughts, regardless of either location and time constraints (Allsop, Bassett, & Hoskins, 2007) Due to the dramatic increase in the amount of consumer-generated media (CGM) platforms, there are shifts from traditional word-of-mouth (WOM) communication to a myriad of electronic communities and virtual networks (Lee, Park, & Han, 2008; Ye, Law, Gu, & Chen, 2011) Notably, one of which is the transferring into electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) communication The fact that consumers tend to favor online users’ recommendations recently to make purchase decisions instead of advertising and professional advice drops a hint that eWOM could be considered as a powerful marketing force (Park, Lee, & Han, 2007; Lee et al., 2008) According to Litvin, Goldsmith, and Pana (2008), the influence of eWOM on hospitality industry seems to be more significant than any other sectors Hospitality industry provides experienced goods (e.g., lodging services and dining), whose quality is usually unknown before actual consumption (Xie, Zhang, & Zhang, 2014) Thereupon, consumers now prefer to seek numerous reviews from various information platforms before making a hotel reservation According to a global survey of PhocusWright among 12,000 leisure travelers, over 80% of them read at least 6-12 reviews on TripAdvisors.com before making a purchase decision (Tnooz, 2014) The result of an investigation conducted by eMarketer (2013) also attracted our notice 717 eMarketer revealed that internet reviews and Online Travel Agency (OTA) sites are travelers’ first two choices, followed by Facebook when they search for traveling information As ranked in top two, OTA sites serve as information centers where people can either search for information, maintain connections, develop relationships or make travel decisions conveniently and cost-effectively (Stepchenkova, Mills, & Jiang, 2007) Thanks to less biased reviews of higher credibility, OTA sites are very popular (e.g., Booking.com, Agoda.com) (Kim, & Hardin, 2010; Litvin et al., 2008) For this study, Vietnam was chosen as the specific setting for our empirical study Recently, the dramatic increase in the number of Vietnamese internet users has reshaped the interaction channels between consumers and product images, which increases the chances for online social interactions According to Internet Live Stats (2016), the total internet users in Vietnam accounted for 52% of Vietnam Population Notably, Vietnamese consumers are willing to spend 25 hours per week on average browsing online social networks and interacting with other online users (eMarketer, 2016) Besides, Vietnam is well known for its diverse tourism potentials According to Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (2016), there was a dramatic increase in a number of 3-5 stars tourist accommodation in the 2013-2015 period, specifically from 598 to 747 These evidence give a hint of enormous opportunities regarding hospitality industry in Vietnam, including new OTA sites targeting Vietnamese online users With regard to the official statistic of Vietnam General Statistics Office (2002) in “Population Population structure by sex Age group and sex ratio (males/100 females)” in the 2001-2002 period, Vietnamese Millennials comprise about approximately 40 percent of the country’s population of Vietnamese Millennials account for about 40 percent of the country’s population Another worth noting study of Zemke, Raines, and Filipczak (2000) early stated that this generation will be shaped into the current high-tech, neo-optimistic time and will represent the most technological adepts Kersten (2002) also found the first characteristic springs to mind when mentioned about Millennials is their comfort with technology Existing literature also hinted that Millennials would xf society into a new world of personal information by sharing and disclosing via social media and mobile technology (Bilgihan, Okumus, & Cobanoglu, 2013) Notably, Bolton et al (2013) claimed that the Millennials’ behavior could indicate future consumer behavior since they are about to become potential consumers of service products in the hospitality industry Four years later, in 2017, Nielsen reported on its official website that the Millennials had traveled more frequently than any other generation, including Baby Boomers, and they will likely travel more due to the increase in incomes and financial standings Above all, the crux of the matter is that their preferences are sufficiently raveled for researchers to predict as they are much more different from other previous generations However, this difficulty has motivated us to further extend existing literature by studying about this generation It is noticeable that Millennials generation in this study are any individuals born from 1981 to 2000 (Zemke et al., 2000) As a side note, Wathen and Burkell (2002) concluded that receivers tend to adopt any senders’ eWOM having higher credibility Sources of eWOM credibility later appear to attract more and more attention of not only academic researchers (e.g., Awad, & Ragowsky, 2008; Cheung, Luo, Sia, & Chen, 2009; Lin, & Fang, 2006) but also practical marketers’ The fact that eWOM has long gained credibility in consumers’ perception (Leung, Law, Hoof, & Buhalis, 2013) and becoming a significant product reputation signals affecting consumers’ purchase decisions when seeking for hotels motivates us to study about the eWOM credibility There are also several prior studies focusing on eWOM in the hotel industry in recent years Many of them measured the impact of eWOM credibility on purchase intention as mediated by various mediation such as trust (Wu, 2013), perceived value, perceived risk (Liang, Choi, & Joppe, 2017) or response ratio (Xie, Zhang, Zhang, Singh, & Lee, 2016) But few of them measured the direct impact of eWOM credibility on purchase intention Another study worth noting of Tsao and Hsieh (2015) noticed a shift in recently focused research topics toward eWOM quality eWOM with high quality is considered to enhance perceived eWOM credibility and purchase intention (Jensen, Averbeck, Zhang, & Wright, 2013; Jiménez, & Mendoza, 2013; Zhao, Lu, Wang, Chau, & Zhang, 2012) At current, this matter has not been investigated toward product offerings, especially in 718 Vietnam Besides, this research is aimed to contribute to the controversial topic on factors inducing eWOM credibility, especially in OTA environment While the study of Shamhuyenhanzva, Malon, Tonder, Lombard and Hemsworth (2016) pointed out the partial mediation through source trustworthiness of interestingness, homophily, and authority on eWOM credibility; much of the existing literature would rather use expertise than authority to measure eWOM credibility (Lis, 2013; Tsao, & Hsieh, 2015) In sum, adapted from three main empirical studies (Tsao, & Hsieh, 2015; Lis, 2013; Shamhuyenhanzva et al., 2016), this study aims to (1) examine what factors significantly induce perceived eWOM credibility of reviews on OTA sites; (2) investigate the direct impact level of perceived eWOM credibility on purchase intention; (3) identify the mediation effects Literature Review 2.1 E-WOM Credibility Source credibility refers to the expected ability of the information source to generate factual, accurate and credible information (Cheung et al., 2009; Dou, Walden, Lee, & Lee, 2012) The more credible online review is perceived, the greater chance that reviews’ seekers will make purchase decisions (Nabi, & Hendriks, 2003) According to Tsao and Hsieh (2015), perceived eWOM credibility is an antecedent to purchase intention Their finding is also supported by the work of Jiménez and Mendoza (2013) Regarding the context of this study, if the Millennial online users perceived hotel reviews on OTA sites as credible, they might use it to make a reservation Concerning Tsao and Hsieh (2015), this study solely used positive phrasing for all of eWOM content to ensure eWOM content’s valence Therefore, Hypothesis Perceived credibility of positive eWOM significantly induces purchase intention Source of eWOM credibility Besides, many classical studies share a general agreement that source expertise and source trustworthiness are two major determinants of information credibility (Applbaum and Anatol, 1972; Ohanian, 1990; Lis, 2013; Tsao and Hsieh, 2015) Source Expertise Ohanian (1990) shows that source expertise is referred as the perceived ability of each to possess either knowledge, skills or experience to answer whether it provides accurate information or not In the context of services, prior studies demonstrated that information provided by an expert source is more persuasive, more authentic and has a greater impact on receivers’ attitude (Bansal, & Voyer, 2000; Wangenheim, & Bayón, 2004) Receiver tends to display a high expectation of highly qualified information from the sender with high expertise (e.g., knowledge and competence), so the receiver has little cause to question the correctness of review content (McCracken, 1989) Base on the above argument, we propose the second hypothesis: Hypothesis The higher source expertise is perceived, the more likelihood that eWOM is perceived credible Source Trustworthiness Source trustworthiness, on the other hand, refers to the extent to which an individual's statement is believed as authentic (Pornpitakpan, 2004) The information shown in a trustworthy source is considered to be more influential, more credible and less doubtful than information of an origin considered less trustworthy (Huang and Chen, 2006) In sum, we predict Millennials will perceive positive eWOM as credible if the review is perceived to come from a high expertise sender and high trustworthy source Thus, hypothesis is proposed: Hypothesis The higher source trustworthy is perceived, the more likelihood that eWOM is perceived credible Homophily 719 According to Miller and Hoppe (1973), homophily is supposed to affect source credibility significantly With reference to Rogers (1983), homophily is defined as the similarities degree among individuals in term of certain traits It is further stated that individuals’ similarity could lead to a greater level of interpersonal attraction, trust, understanding, interaction and sharing mutual concern compared to dissimilarity (Laumann, 1966) If a source closely resembles the sender, the source appears more attractive to him (McGuire, 1985) Previously, demographic characteristics (e.g., gender, age, and race) have drawn much attention of researchers (Saiki, & Delong, 2006; Turban, Doughrety, & Lee, 2002) while similarities regarding attitudes, core values and personality were paid no heed However, in the context of eWOM, it is more arduous to measure source credibility by demographic attributes due to the nature of reviewer anonymity (Cheng, & Zhou, 2010) Thus we adopted the highlight of the study of Brown, Broderick, and Lee (2007) to measure source credibility by shared interest and shared mindset Based on prior studies, we suggest hypothesis 4: Hypothesis The higher the perceived homophily among senders and receivers, the higher eWOM credibility is perceived In advance, the mediating effect of source trustworthiness was examined in the path from homophily to perceived eWOM credibility As such, Hypothesis The path from homophily to perceived eWOM credibility through source trustworthiness is positive and significant 2.2 E-WOM quality DeLone and McLean (1992) declared that information quality significantly contributes to the success of an information system Besides, Jiménez and Mendoza (2013) stated that product’s quality in the mind of receivers could be enhanced by enhancing the quality of eWOM, ergo indirectly enhancing purchase intention Notably, Awad and Ragowsky (2008) revealed that consumers care about the correctness and usefulness of online reviews, and eWOM seekers are more likely to trust a content with good quality Evidence reveals a positive direct effect of eWOM quality on perceived eWOM credibility toward credence good (Tsao, & Hsieh, 2015) Therefore, it can be assumed in this study that high-quality eWOM on OTA sites increase not only the perceived eWOM credibility but also the possibility that Millennial eWOM receivers make a reservation Hence, the next two hypotheses are proposed: Hypothesis The higher the quality of eWOM, the more likelihood that eWOM is perceived to be credible Hypothesis The higher the quality of eWOM, the more likelihood that eWOM receiver makes a reservation Concerning Tsao and Hsieh (2015), this study solely assumed high quality for all of the eWOM content to ensure eWOM content’s valence In advance, for this study, we took into consideration the mediation through perceived eWOM on the eWOM quality – purchase intention path Therefore, Hypothesis The path from eWOM quality to purchase intention through perceived eWOM credibility is positive and significant Methodology Due to the context of the study, we conducted quantitative research to maximize the number of data collected to the reliability and validity of research hypotheses and research model After collected, the data would be analyzed and interpreted thoroughly Sample Profile and Data Collection Google Forms, a free service for data collection provided by Google, was used to conduct the selfadministered online survey Considering the purpose of this study is to investigate eWOM characteristics’ 720 impact on purchase intentions in a specific group (i.e., OTA users), an online survey is one of the common methods Besides, to assure the comprehensibility of the questions, the questionnaire was pre-tested on 50 respondents Since there is no concern reported in these pilot tests, this questionnaire construction was considered to be definitive The final questionnaire link was posted on several traveling groups in popular social network sites (e.g., Facebook) and several universities in Ho Chi Minh city where Vietnamese Millennials are easy to reach Development of Measures This research targeted only Vietnamese Millennials who used OTA sites to book a hotel, so the first section included two questions regarding the year of birth and OTA usage to sort unqualified respondents out Potential respondents qualified if they are Millennial consumers who have made a hotel reservation from any OTA sites at least once The second section focused on identifying respondents’ profile, traveling patterns and hotel booking references The final section was used to measure respondents’ perception toward seven factors and their relationships proposed in the literature review above The measurement scale of this study adopted items from different prior research and modified questions to fit the identity of eWOM on OTA sites We adopted five items from Ohanian (1990) to measure expertise while using four items recommended by Whitehead (1968) to best measure source trustworthiness For homophily, we modified four items from the work of Shamhuyenhanzva (2016) To measure perceived eWOM credibility, three items extracted from the study of Cheung et al (2009) were used We adopted measurement items from the study of Park et al (2007) to measure eWOM quality Lastly, for purchase intention, the final dependable construct, we extracted four items from the scale proposed by Dodds, Monroe and Grewal (1991) All of the indicators were positively expressed on a 5-point Likert Scale, ranging from (strongly disagree) to (strongly agree) The questionnaire was designed in either Vietnamese or English to ensure the understanding of Vietnamese Millennials Results Within three months, from February to April 2018, a total of 365 qualified responses out of 451 respondents were collected through online surveys, which accounts for more than 80%, meets the sample size requirement of Schumacker and Lomax (2010) (i.e., 250-500 subjects) The rest are considered as invalid either because the respondents reported themselves to have not used OTA sites before or because they are not Vietnamese Millennials As shown in Table 1, 100% respondents are Vietnamese, 83.8% of which are in 18-23 age group, and the rest age from 24 to 37 Most respondents reported themselves to having bachelor’s degree (79.5%) Interestingly, the next answers generally help identify a common pattern of traveling and common online usage To be more specific, approximately 79% of respondents spent more than hours a day on suffering the Internet for leisure, which indicates that Vietnamese Millennials tend to highly bond with technology and the Internet Secondly, Vietnamese Millennials tend to prefer seeking for information and reviews to posting their experience as 61% of respondents reported themselves not to leave any reviews on OTA sites In general, 98% respondents traveled at least once during last year, 49% of which reported themselves to travel more than trips Next, when further assess travel plans within the next 12 months, only 4% respondents reported having not make up their mind yet while 66% of respondents have already planned to travel within months Hence, these results emphasize the role of Vietnamese Millennials as the most potential consumers in tourism and hospitality industry Lastly, with 721 regard to the percentage of favorite OTA usage, it is worth pointing out that domestic OTA sites (i.e., Ivivu,vn; Mytour.vn; Vntrip.vn) are far less preferred to global OTA sites Reliability test To test internal consistency reliability of the measurement model,we used cronbach’s alpha criteria with reference to Anderson and Gerbing (1988) EXP1 and QUAL4 violate the rule of Field (2005) as their “Cronbach's alpha if item deleted” values are higher than the overall Cronbach's alpha, thus they were removed from the measurement model [See Table 2] The result of reliability test after removing inappropriate items well supported the internal consistency reliability of measurement model Preliminary analyses of empirical data The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Bartlett's Test of Sphericity were conducted to assess sampling adequacy and examine whether factor analysis applies to the measurement A total of 23 items contributes to the KMO values of 0.891 at a significant level of 0.000, which exceeds the meritorious threshold of 0.80 (Kaiser, 1974), therefore appeared to be applicable for further analysis Common bias method As both dependent and independent variables were taken from the same respondent doing selfadministered survey might result in the inflated relationship between variable, also known as common method bias (Podsakoff, & Organ, 1986; Conway, & Lance, 2010) To detect the potential of common method bias, we conducted Harman’s single-factor test (Podsakoff, & Organ, 1986) with an approach of unrotated maximum likelihood analysis extracting all variables into one factor The single factor only covers 29.23% of the whole variance, which is less than 50% Thus the probability that a substantial common method bias occurs is low Measurement model evaluation At the initial stage, we measured the validity and reliability of measurement model both with Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis approach Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) As the measurement items were adopted and modified from prior studies, an EFA approach of maximum likelihood analysis with eigenvalues greater than through Promax rotation for 20 measured items was conducted Concerning Fabrigar, Wegener, MacCallum, and Strahan (1999), maximum likelihood best suits data relatively normally distributed The result of pattern matrix categorized 23 items into six distinct components [see Table 3] None of the factors loaded under the value of 0.5 meets the requirement of Hair, Anderson, Tatham and Black (1998) Besides, there is no items having a value of loading value minus crossing value greater than 0.3 Therefore, it is unnecessary to delete any items Then, we used the determinant of the matrix as a criterion to test for multicollinearity As the determinant value of 23-item matrix is 0.000021, greater than the threshold of 0.00001 recommended by Field (2005), multicollinearity is not a problem for these data Furthermore, the data highly met the requirement of Anderson and Gerbing (1988) that total variance explained was 57.29%, higher than recommended of 50% Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Next, we conducted CFA by AMOS software version 20 to firstly examine the consistency within measured constructs using model fit indices and further assess measurement model’s validity Model fit The results demonstrated that the measurement model fits the data well at p=0.000: the ratio of chi-square test size and number of degrees of freedom [χ2/d.f.] = 1.42, root mean square error of 722 approximation [RMSEA] = 0.03, standardized root mean square residual [SRMR] = 0.02, normed fit index [NFI] = 0.92, goodness of fit index [GFI] = 0.93, and comparative fit index [CFI] = 0.98 (Carmines, & McIver, 1981) The measures of overall fit meet conventional standards Hence, the measurement model met the requirement of absolute fit, incremental fit, and parsimonious fit The validity of measurement model All 23 items loaded significantly into proper constructs at p < 0.001 and their value of Standardized Regression Weights are all greater than 0.5, which indicates the convergent validity exists (Bagozzi and Yi, 1988; Hair, Bush, & Ortinau, 2006) With reference to Fornell and Larcker (1981), the square root of each AVE in each variable [written in bold in the matrix diagonal of Table 4] is greater in all cases than the other correlation values among the latent variables [written in off-diagonal elements in their corresponding row and column] Therefore, the discriminant validity of the measurement scale is also verified Besides, for all constructs, the composite reliability exceeds the threshold value of 0.7 (Bagozzi and Yi, 1988) Following Bagozzi and Yi (1988), we verified convergent validity for a reflective measurement model by evaluating the average variance extracted (AVE) of each latent variable instead of using items’ loadings and cross-loadings All of the AVE values [shown in Table 4] are greater than the acceptable threshold of 0.5, so convergent validity is confirmed With reference to Fornell and Larcker (1981), the square root of each AVE in each variable, written in bold in the matrix diagonal of Table 4, is greater in all cases than the off-diagonal elements in their corresponding row and column, supporting the discriminant validity Besides, Sweeney and Soutar (2001) suggested that the discriminant validity is also assured if correlations between pairs of variables are significantly below one As the square root of AVE [shown in Table 4] is verified for all pairs, so the discriminant validity is also confirmed Therefore, the validity and reliability of measurement scale is confirmed Structural model evaluation For this study, Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was applied in-depth to examine the hypothesized causal relationship between latent constructs as well as their significance level (Hair et al., 1998) Before conducting SEM, we first assess the structural model’s overall model fit indices to estimate the strength of relationships among scale items and latent constructs Model fit The overall result is significant and shows good fit indices: [Chi-square] = 457.582; [χ2/d.f.] = 1.182 (< 3); [GFI] = 0.906 (>0.9); [TLI] = 0.927 (>0.9); [CFI] = 0.936 (>0.9), and [RMSEA] = 0.024 (PI, TRUST->CRED, HOM->CRED, QUA->PI are all less than 0.05 Especially, with regard to CRED->PI, TRUST->CRED, and QUA->PI, all of the p-values are highly significant at a confidence level of 99.9% Furthermore, all estimate weights are positive; hence these relationships are proved to be positive by the data H1, H3, H4, H7 are therefore supported The statistics in Table also reveal that regarding the strength of relationships on CRED, TRUST shows the strongest positive effect (0.556) highly significant under the confidence level of 99.9% In the contrary, p-values of two paths, namely EXP->CRED and QUA->CRED, are greater than 0.05, which indicates the significance under the confidence level of 95% Consequently, H2, H6 are not supported by data Mediation 723 Last but not least, for the initial purpose of this study, we examined each of two indirect paths proposed above One of which is from HOM to CRED through TRUST Another is from QUA to PI as mediated by CRED Based on the results in table [see Table 6], the path from HOM to CRED through TRUST (i.e., parameter AxB) is positive and significant at p < 0.01 Meanwhile, the indirect effect of QUA on PI as mediated by CRED (i.e., parameter DxE) is positive but not significant (p = 0.519) As a result, H5 is supported while H8 is disregarded To summarize, the results of hypotheses testing and the final research model are shown in Figure Conclusions It is noticeable that travel pattern of 365 respondents indicates a potential market toward hospitality products in Vietnam That Vietnamese Millennials comprise of approximately 40% of the total population contributes to the potential of tourism and hospitality industry in the not too distance future Most of the respondents traveled a lot during the last year, 1-5 trips most commonly The trend of traveling is predicted to continuously raising due to the low fare of flights and accommodations Seven-tenths of respondents already made a plan to travel within months Besides, four fifth of respondents spent more than hours a day to wandering the Internet for leisure purpose, hence it is more likely to trigger them to travel or seek for information through OTA sites With the main objectives are relationship prediction and explanation of target constructs, we examine five distinct variables namely expertise, trustworthiness, homophily, perceived eWOM credibility and purchase intention The measurement model had a very good fit, and all of Cronbach’s alpha values are highly good The results revealed sets of the relationship between proposed variables related to eWOM that have not been investigated in the context of OTA site in Vietnam before To be more specific, the path estimation from perceived eWOM credibility to purchase intention is positive and significant, which is consistent with our prediction and findings of Tsao and Hsied (2015), perceived eWOM credibility is a strong antecedent to purchase intention, in which the impact level is 40.2% Therefore, it can be concluded that Vietnamese Millennial online users make a reservation if they consider the positive reviews on OTA about that hotel is credible; on the contrary, if reviews are regarded as fake or manipulated by marketers, the final purchase decision is unlikely to be made Furthermore, these Vietnamese Millennial respondents share similarities with another target sample of Tsao and Hsieh’s study (2015) With regard to factors inducing perceived eWOM credibility, we examined four distinct direct paths from source trustworthiness, source expertise, homophily and eWOM quality In summary, the proposed theoretical framework has confirmed that the path estimation from homophily and source trustworthiness to perceived eWOM credibility are positive and significant, once again consistent with the finding of Shamhuyenhanzva et al (2016) In specific, the study revealed among the four antecedents of perceived eWOM credibility; source trustworthiness shows the strongest effect regarding standardized regression weights estimated, in which the impact level reached to more than 50% This finding is supported by either Lis (2013) or Shamhuyenhanzva et al (2016), which indicates once the reviewers are perceived to be right, trustworthy, honest and just, there is more likelihood that receivers will follow the recommendation On the contrary to the work of Lis (2013) and Tsao and Hsieh (2015), we found no significant effect of source expertise on perceived eWOM credibility as well as eWOM with high quality on perceived eWOM credibility According to Lis, the disclosure of user’s identity hinders the generation of homophily due to the anonymity environment on OTA sites However, the difference could have been explained by the assumption that OTA environment creates a strong tie between individuals sharing same interests or concerns in traveling and booking hotels Meanwhile, although reviews are perceived to be accurate, complete, reliable and useful, 724 eWOM seekers might question the objective of the reviewer In other words, eWOM seekers still question the posting purpose of reviewers As a further investigation, we explore two indirect effects, one of which is on perceived eWOM credibility of homophily The result shows a significant positive effect Besides, we found a positive significant direct effect from homophily to perceived eWOM credibility; thus source trustworthiness partially mediates the effect of homophily on perceived eWOM credibility This finding again matchs with the work of Shamhuyenhanzva et al (2016) With regard to the second indirect effect, neither direct effect from eWOM quality on purchase intention nor the mediation through perceived eWOM credibility was found to be significant Hence, the mediation through perceived eWOM credibility on purchase intention of eWOM quality is unnecessary The significance of the study and practical implication The research findings have contributed to the extension of existing eWOM literature, particularly in Vietnam industry The findings provide and support empirical evidence on the usability of source trustworthiness, homophily on the perception of eWOM credibility and the significant direct positive impact of perceived eWOM credibility on purchase intention not only toward credence goods but also toward experienced products in the hospitality sector Notably, the peculiarity in the effect of source expertise and eWOM with high quality, with reference to the finding of Lis (2013) and Tsao and Hsieh (2015), has contributed to the debate of existing eWOM literature With regard to the practical implications, we propose some initial recommendations that practical marketers may find them useful in enhancing purchase intention and attracting potential consumers via credible eWOM initiatives Firstly, marketers of OTA sites must bear in mind that remaining credibility within any online environment is a must The results also suggest the three main factors including OTA’s trustworthiness can homophily can significantly induce potential consumers’ perception of reviews credibility Therefore, several recommendations such as keeping track of either negative or positive hotels’ reviews while ensuring the feeling of belongingness among eWOM seekers can be adopted Manipulating fake reviews with high-quality content under the perception of an expert can enrich the positiveness of review content but cannot induce perceived eWOM credibility Instead, marketers had better act as moderators and enabled potential consumers to leave and exchange their views with others freely By designing and executing marketing strategies together with providing good services, marketers probably can trigger real consumers to leave positive reviews Limitations and Future Research Several limitations should be acknowledged in this study Firstly, the results might have been influenced by common method bias Even though Harman’s single-factor test was conducted to test for this bias, potential bias from the researchers in developing the questionnaire still exists Thus, we applied pretest on 50 respondents to reduce it as much as possible Secondly, the trend of traveling via OTA sites is still in the primitive stage and just started to become more popular in Vietnam Besides, with the enormous limitation of non-probability sampling is that inferences cannot be drawn about the larger population based on a nonprobability sample Therefore, the results should be interpreted as only explaining the majority of Vietnamese Millennials using OTA sites rather than all Vietnamese Millennial travelers Thirdly, the Cronbach’s alpha of expertise and homophily (respectively 0.680, 0.605) is somewhat lower than the suggested value of 0.70 Finally, this study only examined the effect of positive eWOM with high quality, the relationship among proposed variables should be assumed with neither reviews with low quality nor negative reviews Due to four limitations above, we recommend future researchers to employ a 2x2 factorial design of eWOM quality (high vs low) and perceived eWOM credibility (positive vs negative) to provide more insights about 725 OTA environment Researchers can also further consider the effect of either fare or OTA’s booking policies (e.g., deposit and payment method) on purchase intention Comparing OTA sites’ experience of the Millennials with other generations’ (e.g., generation Z, generation X) might also come up with an interesting conclusion References Allsop, D T., Bassett, B R., & Hoskins, J A (2007) Word-of-Mouth Research: Principles and Applications Journal of Advertising Research, 47(4), 398-411 Anderson, J., Gerbing, W., (1988) Structural equation modelling in practice: A review and recommended two stage approach Psychological Bulletin 27(1), 5-24 Applbaum R F., & Anatol, K W 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High school or less Associate degree Bachelor's degree Master's degree N=414 12 Table The result of Reliability test (before removing inappropriate items) Construct Source Trustworthiness (TRUST) Purchase Intention (PI) Initial Cron Alpha Corrected Items Total Correlation Cron Alpha Items Deleted 0.726 0.783 0.708 0.792 Item Instrument TRUST1 The reviewer is right TRUST2 The reviewer is trustworthy TRUST3 The reviewer is honest 0.688 0.8 TRUST4 The reviewer is just 0.605 0.834 PI1 The probability that I would consider booking hotel on OTA site is high 0.598 0.846 PI2 There is a strong likelihood that I will book hotels on OTA site 0.714 0.799 PI3 If I were to book a hotel, I would consider booking on OTA 0.756 0.78 PI4 I would make a reservation on OTA site next time 0.694 0.808 EXP1 The reviewer is an expert 0.427 0.812 EXP2 The reviewer is experienced 0.62 0.736 728 0.845 0.85 0.791 if Source Expertise (EXP) EXP3 The reviewer is knowledgeable 0.606 0.74 EXP4 The reviewer is skilled 0.607 0.74 EXP5 The reviewer is qualified 0.651 0.732 Perceived eWOM Credibility (CRED) CRED1 I think the review is factual 0.689 0.768 CRED2 I think the review is accurate 0.729 0.726 CRED3 I think the review is credible 0.655 0.801 HOM1 I have the feeling of belongingness when browsing through OTA site 0.634 0.744 HOM2 I think OTA site represent likeminded individuals with similar interests to me 0.616 0.753 HOM3 I favor OTA site because a wide range of people are represented 0.594 0.764 I prefer to read reviews written by whom have the same ideas when getting information on OTA site 0.62 0.751 The reviewer is an expert 0.596 0.654 QUAL2 The reviewer is experienced 0.609 0.642 QUAL3 The reviewer is knowledgeable 0.712 0.599 QUAL4 The reviewer is skilled 0.124 0.837 QUAL5 The reviewer is qualified 0.562 0.662 Homophily (HOM) HOM4 QUAL1 eWOM Quality (QUAL) 0.831 0.802 0.733 Table Pattern Matrix Factor TRUST1 0.864 TRUST2 0.782 TRUST3 0.771 TRUST4 0.564 PI3 0.873 PI2 0.802 PI4 0.762 PI1 0.606 QUAL3 0.859 QUAL2 0.741 QUAL1 0.739 QUAL5 0.642 EXP5 0.721 EXP2 0.719 EXP3 0.714 EXP4 0.68 HOM4 0.721 HOM2 0.711 729 HOM3 0.704 HOM1 0.687 CRED1 0.844 CRED2 0.781 CRED3 0.657 Table Scales reliability and validity CR AVE 0.847 0.582 TRUST TRUST PI QUA EXP HOM CRED 0.344 0.391 0.370 0.408 0.637 PI 0.763 0.344 0.853 0.594 0.335 0.497 0.452 0.426 QUA 0.391 0.771 0.335 0.839 0.567 0.420 0.465 0.341 0.522 EXP 0.370 0.497 0.753 0.420 0.814 0.802 0.397 HOM 0.408 0.452 0.465 0.722 0.468 0.468 0.504 0.460 0.625 CRED 0.637 0.426 0.341 0.397 0.710 0.460 0.832 0.791 Bold figures in the diagonal are the square roots of AVE’s Table Direct effects of the structural model Hypothesis Relationship H1 CRED->PI H2 EXP->CRED H3 TRUST->CRED H4 HOM->CRED H6 QUA->CRED H7 QUA->PI Estimate S.E C.R p-value 0.402 0.117 0.556 0.199 0.028 0.196 0.07 0.063 0.062 0.083 0.049 0.067 6.565 1.886 8.324 2.782 0.581 3.38 *** 0.059 *** 0.005** 0.561 *** Decision Supported Not supported Supported Supported Not supported Supported ***significant at p < 0.001; **significant at p < 0.01; *significant at p < 0.05 Table Indirect effects of the structural model Parameter Relationship Estimate p-value Decision A HOM->TRUST 0.457 *** Supported B TRUST->CRED 0.556 *** Supported C AxB HOM->CRED 0.199 0.005** Supported HOM->TRUST->CRED QUA->CRED 0.004 0.561 Supported D 0.295 0.028 E CRED->PI 0.402 *** Supported F QUA->PI 0.196 *** Supported DxE QUA->CRED->PI 0.013 0.519 Not supported ***significant at p < 0.001; **significant at p < 0.01; *significant at p < 0.05 730 Not supported Note: Dotted line indicates relationship not significant at significance level of 0.05 Figure Revised research model 731 ... internet reviews and Online Travel Agency (OTA) sites are travelers’ first two choices, followed by Facebook when they search for traveling information As ranked in top two, OTA sites serve as information... the 2001-2002 period, Vietnamese Millennials comprise about approximately 40 percent of the country’s population of Vietnamese Millennials account for about 40 percent of the country’s population... for hotels motivates us to study about the eWOM credibility There are also several prior studies focusing on eWOM in the hotel industry in recent years Many of them measured the impact of eWOM