Abstract
Purpose - Following the speedy development of the smart phone industry, tourism companies started to increase their brand recognition and sales volume by adopting mobile applications. However, applications for tourism industries are still insignificant. This study tries to analyze empirical evidence from Korean and Chinese consumers who have used mobile tour applications. By using an expansion of the technology acceptance model (TAM), this study will find what factors have effects on user intention for mobile tour applications. The findings will be helpful for the development of mobile tour applications and the tourism industries. Research design, data, and methodology - This study uses the TAM, which was presented by Davis in 1989. This study uses consumer acceptance level, consumer choice attitude, and use intention as the basic variables to fit to the TAM, and adopts choice content quality, brand value, and usage motivation as additional variables to analyze. This study has developed several hypotheses and collected data from 620 users who used mobile applications for tourism during April 1 to April 30, 2015. A total of 612 valid questionnaires were collected and used in the data analysis. The data was analyzed with structural equation modeling using SPSS Win/pc and Amos 22.0. Results - The findings can be summarized as follows: First, the content quality affects the consumer acceptance degree and choice attitude. Second, the brand value has a directly positive effect on the consumer acceptance degree and choice attitude. It is clear that the content quality and brand value play important roles in raising consumer acceptance and choice attitude. Third, usage motivation has no effect on the consumer acceptance degree and choice attitude. Fourth, the acceptance degree does not have any effect on the consumer choice attitude. Fifth, the acceptance degree affects the use intention. Last, the consumer choice attitude affects the use intentions. This indicates that consumer acceptance and choice attitude must both be achieved to induce use intention among consumers. Finally, the effects of the mobile tour application content quality and brand value on consumer acceptance degree and choice attitude were confirmed. Additionally, the effects of the consumer acceptance degree and choice attitude on use intentions were analyzed. Conclusion - It is not meaningful for tourism marketing to launch tour applications in the mobile market without understanding tourism consumer characteristics. When developing mobile tour applications, companies should focus on the characters of consumer choice attitudes as high quality, high brand value, usefulness, and ease of mobile tour applications. This study has limitations in that it did not consider negative factors such as perceived risks or analyze whether there are differences between Korean and Chinese consumers. In the future, we will consider equipping the same mobile tour applications commonly used by both Korean and Chinese consumers, and then examine negative factors as well as the differences in mobile tour applications between Korean and Chinese consumers.