Where Do I Go to Treat Me? Factors That Influence Users’ Behavioral Intention

The aim of this paper is to analyze how some specific factors can impact on attitudes towards usage (ATU), and effect on behavioral intention (BI), when the potential medical tourist carries out the medical tourist destination information sourcing process. Specifically, we considered electronic word of mouth communication (eWOM), trust (TRT), perceived usefulness (PU), and perceived ease of use (PEOU). The data were collected from 698 experienced users participating in a tourism thematic Facebook group. The results state that being social media an effective channel to share contents among users, the more expert users are more influenced in the behavioural intention of choosing medical tourism destinations and trust is the variables with the strongest influence on attitude, which affects users’ behavioural intention towards the use of Facebook to find information on medical tourism destination. These results contribute to the scientific debate on users’ behavior in utilizing social media to find information for a medical tourism destination and provide support to the marketing and communication strategies of medical tourism practitioners.

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