Predicting the intentions to use chatbots for travel and tourism

Santiago Melián-González, Desiderio Gutiérrez-Taño and Jacques Bulchand-Gidumal

Current Issues in Tourism, 2021, vol. 24, issue 2, 192-210

Abstract: As with other businesses, tourist companies are taking advantage of modern technologies. Chatbots are a recent technology that hotels, travel agencies, and airline companies are adopting. Despite this industry-wide implementation, there is no evidence about the factors that explain why consumers are willing to interact with chatbots. This work proposes a model to explain chatbot usage intention. The model and its hypotheses were tested by structural equations with the PLS technique. The study was conducted on a sample of 476 individuals who had travelled on vacation in the previous 12 months. The study reveals that the intentions behind using chatbots are directly influenced by the following factors: the chatbots’ expected performance, the habit of using chatbots, the hedonic component in using them, the predisposition to using self-service technologies, the social influences, and the fact that the chatbot behaves like a human. The inconvenience and problems related to communicating with the chatbot were found to have a negative influence. Lastly, the possibility that chatbots could replace jobs had a surprisingly positive influence, and not a negative one.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13683500.2019.1706457 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rcitxx:v:24:y:2021:i:2:p:192-210

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rcit20

DOI: 10.1080/13683500.2019.1706457

Access Statistics for this article

Current Issues in Tourism is currently edited by Jennifer Tunstall

More articles in Current Issues in Tourism from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().