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Over the past fifty years, the evolution of information technology leads to great development in the hospitality industry (Agag and El-Masry, 2017; Ponte et al., 2015; Law et al., 2019). Online purchasing of goods and services via the Internet have been rapidly increased (Oliveira et al., 2017). Internet allows online hotel providers to sell their products anytime and anywhere (Agag and El-Masry, 2017). Transactions via the internet represent a new stage in the hospitality industry, which works to develop better commercial practices (Kim et al., 2011). Online hospitality transactions account for 25 percent of sales of hospitality products (US Census Bureau, 2017). Based on the Market Intelligence Centre forecast, online hospitality business represents the Internet largest business area (62%), which generates over 555 billion United States dollars of revenue in 2017, online hotels sales grew 16% between 2014 and 2018 and prediction until 2020 has shown that online hospitality revenues grow at 10% yearly (Statista, 2019).
In the hospitality context, Kim et al. (2011) pointed out that trust plays a crucial role in making online booking transactions successful. Numerous studies examined the antecedents of trust in the online context (Söllner and Marco, 2015; Aïmeur et al., 2016; Sebastianelli and Tamimi, 2018; Cheng et al., 2019). For instance, Agag and El-Masry (2017) investigate factors affecting trust and the influence of consumers trust, attitude, and perceive risk on travelers’ intention to buy travel products online in Egypt. Since uncertainties exist in online transactions, numerous studies have pointed out that trust is a major factor affecting e-commerce successful proliferation (Kim et al., 2016; Kim and Peterson, 2017). Trust plays an important role in online travel and tourism context (Agag and El-Masry, 2017; Mariani et al., 2019), and understanding its drivers and outcomes is a major concern for several reasons. First, antecedents of online trust help online service providers to identify the relative importance of factors affecting online trust. Therefore, online service providers will be able to devise suitable measures in order to build customer trust. Second, consequences of online trust assist online service providers to identify the significance of trust and its effects on purchasing behavior.
Culture is widely believed to affect customers’ behavior and value (Matzler et al., 2016; Fan et al., 2018). Srite and Karahanna (2006) pointed out that models of customers’ behavior do not universally hold across cultures. Ashraf et al. (2014) pointed out that consumers at different adoption stages exhibit different behaviors. Jarvenpaa et al. (1999) pointed out that customers in different cultures have differing expectations of what makes an online service provider trustworthy. Furthermore, due to the online shopping unique nature (i.e. customers cannot taste, feel, or touch the products), consumers perceive it as risky (Pavlou, 2003; Thongpapanl et al., 2018). Online hotels have rapidly proliferated, even in emerging markets. However, though it is now global, online hospitality studies have been conducted almost exclusively in advanced countries. In addition, regardless the fact that differences in national culture can influence consumer behavior, most online hospitality research has ignored the influence of culture (Matzler et al., 2016; Thongpapanl et al., 2018). Current studies on trust towards hotel websites under different cultures, however, remain equivocal (Agag and El-Masry, 2017).