Mobile Travel Apps and Generation Y in Malaysia

Abstract

Modern travelers prefer an easy and enjoyable experience upon travelling. According to several surveys, over 25% of respondents have installed mobile travel apps on their smartphone. Basically, the travel app is used to search and book flights or accommodation, while download and install the app is mainly to receive notification on the updated trip status and also for accessing app offline. Therefore, it's essential for tourism organization to emphasize on traveler preferences and new innovated technology could offer for competitive advantages in tourism industry. Generation Y grew up with technology and it constitutes 44% of population in Malaysia. Therefore, this research is focus on Generation Y in Malaysia, based on the UTAUT2 (Consumer Acceptance and Use of Information Technology) model to explore and predict the factors influencing the intention to use mobile travel apps. A total of 245 questionnaires were distributed to all states in Malaysia. Quantitative data were analyzed using IBM SPSS 22.0 and Smart PLS 3.0 software. The results findings show that performance expectancy has the highest significant relationship on behavioral to use mobile travel apps. It was followed by facilitating conditions and habit. Factors of effort expectancy, social influence, hedonic motivation and price value don't have much effect on individual's behavioral intention to use mobile travel apps. The theoretical, managerial and practical implications of these results are discussed.

ARAM: A Technology Acceptance Model to Ascertain the Behavioural Intention to Use Augmented Reality

“…Here, results demonstrate that the stronger the participants’ hedonic motivation regarding pleasure, fun and control on using the system is, the stronger the behavioural intention to use it will be (H8). It should be noted that these results are in line with previous research [ 42 ] but not with a more recent study [ 66 ], which presents hedonic motivation as not influencing behavioural intention to use. Even though both consider HM as a two-dimensional (fun and pleasure) approach, our study reinforces the importance of HM and its three dimensions on acceptance studies as necessary items to ascertain this construct.…”

“…Taking into account some limitations identified in the literature, this study also addresses the need to extend an acceptance study to several heritage sites—therefore not being restricted to a single one while collecting results—[ 55 ], while being strongly supported by end-users and their point of view [ 52 , 53 ]. It also tackles the issue of reduced sample size [ 53 , 55 ] or limited samples targeted for a particular generation [ 66 ] by integrating a wide and diversified sample of participants, thus allowing to comfortably propose ARAM as an acceptance model for AR technology for a variety of scenarios.…”

“…Although literature sustains the negative effect of EE on BI [ 42 , 44 ], this relation between both constructs was not statistically validated in several recent studies [ 43 , 45 , 64 , 66 ]. For this reason, effort expectancy is not proposed in ARAM as having a direct link with behavioural intention (H3), as the UTAUT model sustains.…”

“…The importance of this construct has been highlighted as well as its role in influencing the use of technological systems indirectly [ 70 , 72 , 74 , 75 ]. It is uncertain whether it has any direct influence on BI [ 21 , 77 ], sometimes even being referred to as not influencing behaviour [ 66 ]. Aiming to better understand HM´s role in BI, ARAM proposes a direct relation between HM and BI (H8).…”