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Trust Perceptions Of Online Travel Information By Different Content Creators: Some Social And Legal Implications., Stephen Burgess, Carmine Sellitto, Carmen Cox, Jeremy Buultjens

Carmen Cox

Consumers are increasingly turning to the online environment to provide information to assist them in making purchase decisions related to travel products. They often rely on travel recommendations from different sources, such as sellers, independent experts and, increasingly, other consumers. A new type of online content, user-generated content (UGC), provides a number of legal and social challenges to providers and users of that content, especially in relation to areas such as defamation, misrepresentation and social embarrassment. This paper reports research that examined the level of trustworthiness of online travel information from these different sources. The study used a survey of …