An experience-based framework for evaluating tourism mobile commerce platforms

Abstract

This research presents and studies an evaluation framework for tourism mobile commerce platforms based on tourists' experience. Synthesizing from prior literature, relevant theories, and the results of online questionnaires, we select 24 evaluation indices for preliminary evaluation. Using exploratory factor analysis method, we then extract from these indices the following five principal factors: interactive experience, infrastructure experience, personalization experience, product or service quality experience, and product operation experience. We further employ the confirmatory factor analysis to test the construction of the evaluation framework and demonstrate that the evaluation framework is both robust and effective. Finally, based on our proposed evaluation framework, we empirically evaluate the most popular mobile commerce platforms (Ctrip and Qunaer) in China by using fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method.