The TikTok effect on tourists’ behaviour: Examining perceived attractiveness of food places in Amsterdam.

There is a new phenomenon in Amsterdam: TikTok queues. This situation reflects hordes of tourists waiting for popular food places, which is assumed to be inspired by videos on the social media platform TikTok. With this, tourists block the pavements in the city, leaving residents dissatisfied with this form of overtourism. The queues bring issues, and therefore, there is a need that this problem is addressed. The perceived attractiveness may be caused by perceived authenticity, norms, regret aversion, and video content. These topics combined, aimed to fill a research gap. Therefore, the study focused on the subsequent research question: What is the effect of perceived authenticity, norms, regret aversion, and video content on the perceived attractiveness of food places in Amsterdam by tourists? To investigate this research question, several hypotheses were formulated, and various analyses were executed by the use of the quantitative survey method. The data collection was conducted in person through a QR code at five different food places in the city centre, which were Chun Café, Van Stapele Koekmakerij, Saint-Jean, Fabel Friet, and Vlaams Friteshuis Vlemincx. In total, there was data analysed of 147 respondents for this study. From this data, it was concluded that perceived authenticity is the most important reason for tourists’ perceived attractiveness of the food places in Amsterdam. In addition, trust through online videos was partially accepted to positively influence tourists’ perceived attractiveness towards the food places. The hypothesis for informativeness could not be answered. Furthermore, this study showed that queue lengths was a weak measurement scale for perceived attractiveness. Injunctive norms, descriptive norms, regret aversion, and social interactions through online videos did not have a significant or positive influence on perceived attractiveness of the food places. Moreover, regret aversion was a weak measurement scale, partially owing to one non-theoretical measurement item that was added. To compare the different food places, Van Stapele Koekmakerij scored best on perceived attractiveness overall. Fabel Friet showed to have on average the longest queue length in amount of people. And last, the given name of TikTok queues was justified by this research.