Determinants of continued use of tourism and hospitality e-commerce platforms and the role of information transparency

Information transparency is a major influence on customers’ transaction-related decision-making process in an e-commercial environment. However, existing literature still lacks insight into this phenomenon in tourism management research. This study aims to integrate social cognitive theory into a value-based adoption model to investigate relationships between information transparency, perceived value, and continued use of tourism and hospitality e-commerce platforms. The proposed model was tested using structural equation modelling to analyze data collected from 253 respondents. The analysis revealed that product and transaction information transparency had significant positive associations with the convenience and financial benefit of using a travel-related tourism e-commerce platform as perceived by customers. However, it had significant negative associations with the perceived privacy risk and performance uncertainty. On the other hand, perceived value had a significant positive association with continued use. Additionally, service guarantee moderated the negative effects of perceived privacy risk and perceived performance uncertainty on perceived value. Meaningful findings and implications of the empirical data are also discussed.