Factors Affecting Continuance Intention in E-Tourism Technologies Amidst Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The recent eruption of COVID-19 has led to the adverse effect to the people and the economy across the world where it has brought life, companies, and the tourism industry to a halt. Consequently, it has been said that this impact will depend not only on the length of the pandemic but also potential long-term changes in travel behaviour as a result of the crisis. Nonetheless, as trips become safer during post pandemic, people may need extra encouragement to travel again, and one promising way to do this is through continuous use of novel immersive technologies that are able to provide timely information and protect them from the pandemic. Hence, grounded by the Expectation-Confirmation Model (ECM), the purpose of this study is to examine tourists’ continuance intention to use e-tourism technologies such as social media, mobile apps, augmented reality, and smart technologies, as well as websites and reservation systems, in the Malaysian context during post pandemic period. Data were collected from 200 respondents using purposive sampling method. Subsequently, the data were analysed using SPSS. The multiple regression analysis result of the main model shows that satisfaction in using e-tourism technologies was found to be the most important factor in determining the continuance intention in those technologies, explaining 76.3% of the variance. On the other hand, confirmation highly influences satisfaction in using e-tourism technologies, explaining 60.6% of the variance. Finally, the similar findings to the present study are discussed. Undoubtedly, this study provides good insights for tourism application developers and service providers in understanding tourist behaviour in terms of continuance intention to use e-tourism technologies during the post pandemic era.