E-tourism: How customers’ intention to use be affected?

Abstract

E-tourism has a significant value in travel industry. It provides one more choice for customers in going for a trip. More and more customers are willing to use it. However, the opaqueness and unrealistic of the Internet are concerned by users. Therefore, this study aims to identify the factors affecting the Hong Kong customers to decide to use E-tourism for their trips as well as the degree of influences of different factors. Technology acceptance model (TAM) is adopted in this study. Besides, additional factors including perceived value, trust and perceived risk are added to the model for further exploration. Both quantitative and qualitative studies were conducted. The result shows that perceived ease of use has the largest degree of influence in affecting Hong Kong customers' purchase intention in using E-tourism. The empirical results of this study support the usual relationship among perceived ease of use, which drives the consumer intention to use E-tourism. The result shows perceived ease of use positively affects intention to use, perceived ease of use positively affects perceived usefulness, perceived value positively affects perceived usefulness, trust positively affects perceived usefulness and trust negatively affects perceived risk. Moreover, the result also shows that perceived usefulness does not significantly influence the intention to use and the relationship between perceived risk and intention to use is not significant. Managerial implications in the development of tourism websites like E-tourism website owners can focus more on user-friendliness.