Social Media Users’ Envy Toward Travel Bloggers: An Investigation of Dual-Mediating Paths and Boundary Conditions

Abstract

Social media travel blogs have emerged as a pivotal tool in tourism marketing, yet users’ emotions in this context remain underexplored. To fill the research gap in social media-induced envy, this study employs scenario-based experiments and semi-structured interviews to investigate the impact of benign versus malicious envy toward bloggers on users’ travel intentions. The findings reveal that benign envy (vs. malicious envy) fosters parasocial interaction and enhances the affective destination image, thereby influencing travel intentions positively. The popularity of a travel blogger’s post as perceived by social media users eliminated the envy effect. Additionally, users’ social inclusion (vs. exclusion) on social media was found to reduce the negative effect of malicious envy on travel intentions. Destination marketers should closely monitor bloggers’ unfavorable social media behavior, and social media platforms may advise travel bloggers on how to design and implement content generation strategies to avoid instilling malicious envy among media users.