The role of trust in e-tourism services

Paper in proceeding, 2016

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the role of trust in e-tourism services focusing on factors that contribute to trust and how it affects users’ intention to adopt e-commerce and m-commerce. Both e-commerce (electronic commerce) and m-commerce (mobile commerce) allow a broad accessibility to services at any time and any places, providing an easy, fast and complete access to services. However, m-commerce in tourism services is currently not widely studied despite the fact that it has good potential for enhancing sustainability. Methodology: Based on previous studies, we proposed a theoretical framework linking factors affecting trust and how trust influences users’ intention to use e-commerce and m-commerce. The structural equation modeling (SEM) method was used to test whether the proposed framework fits the empirical data well using Mplus v.7.4 software. Two mediation tests were carried out for investigating the mechanism of factors which affect trust and how trust influences users’ intention to use m-commerce. The study is based on qualitative and quantitative surveys of which sample was composed of 326 individuals. Findings: The proposed framework fits the empirical data well. We found evidence that ‘security’ and ‘usefulness’ affect the construct ‘trust’ and it further influences the intention to use e-commerce and m-commerce. Specifically, the construct 'ease of use' through ‘usefulness’ affects ‘trust’. There is not sufficient evidence to say that ‘ease of use’ affects ‘trust’ directly. ‘Trust’ does influence ‘intention to use m-commerce’, and at the same time there is an indirect effect through ‘intention to use e-commerce’. This means that the ‘intention to use e-commerce’ is an important mechanism for the construct ‘trust’ to influence the ‘intention to use m-commerce’. Originality/value of paper: The proposed framework can be useful for knowing how factors like security, ease-of-use and usability affect trust. It also shows that e-commerce is the mechanism through which trust can lead to higher intention to use m-commerce, which is a more sustainable solution for tourism services.