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The growing preference of consumers to search for information and make web purchases in travel and tourism context is forcing a number of enterprises to go online. Looking at the complexity that already lies in offline decision making, attracting consumers online, understanding their psychology, and making them purchase is becoming a stringent job for the marketers. Though significant research work has been done in terms of adoption of website services for travel websites, a comparative understanding of the offline and online purchase decision-making process of the consumer and how that can be leveraged in making the consumer loyal through continuous usage of the website services still needs an in-depth understanding. In this chapter, the authors have tried to differentiate between online and offline behavior and proposed a model based on intention adoption and continuance framework which will surely provide insights to both the academicians and marketers/website developers in terms of improving the online buying behavior of consumers in travel and tourism context.

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Website usability has received decent empirical attention in recent academic literature. However, there are various website characteristics that might still influence the usability of websites. In this empirical exploration, we propose three such characteristics: speed with which websites respond to customer requests (i.e., website agility); the capability of websites to restore its operations in the face of a disruption (i.e., website resilience) and the capability of websites to retain the interests of customers and keep them engaged interactively (i.e., website attractiveness) as enablers of website usability based on dynamic capability extension of resource-based view. Further, we argue that website usability will influence electronic word of mouth (e-WOM) for those websites. We also explore if there is any influence of website agility and resilience on website attractiveness. Using customers as target respondents who have used websites mainly for travel and tourism purposes, we test for the proposed relationships through collecting survey data based on face-to-face interview. Partial least squares analysis of 285 survey responses suggests website agility attractiveness and resilience to be dominant enablers for website usability and website usability positively influences e-WOM.

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