THE EFFECTS OF SENSE AND INFORMATION QUALITY IN VIRTUAL TRAVEL EXPERIENCE ON VISIT INTENTION

Abstract

The rapid spread of the COVID-19 epidemic and its transformation into a pandemic caused travel restrictions around the world and people had to stay in their homes. In this period, businesses that offer product or service that require physical contact or make it compulsory to be together with other people, especially businesses operating in the tourism sector, are among the most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to reduce these effects, many tourism businesses have started to develop virtual travel tours for their target audience to experience a destination at home. In this context, it is aimed to investigate the effects of the information quality of the virtual travel experience and the satisfaction created by the perceived sense of the virtual travel experience on the intentions of visiting that destination in the real world. The population of the research consists of individuals who have virtual travel experience. Among the individuals constituting the population, 564 people were reached by convenience sampling method, 172 people were excluded because they stated that they did not have a virtual travel experience or because they were under the age of 18, and 392 people were included in the study. In the research, factor, correlation, and regression analyzes were applied with a statistical package program to the data obtained by the online survey application. In the results of the analysis, it was found that the sense of virtual travel and the quality of information perceived from a destination experience in the virtual world have a positive and significant effect on satisfaction with virtual reality travel. It has been determined that this satisfaction, which consists of virtual reality travel, has a positive and relatively strong significant effect on visit intention.