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Top1. Introduction
In today’s’ world, consumers highly rely on peer review opinions (Diana Gavilan, Maria Avello & Gema Martinez-Navarro, 2018). Information published by experienced customers on online platforms facilitates novice consumers in their purchasing decision (Kumar and Sharma, 2020; Ambilee & Bui, 2011; Kumar, 2019; Gavilan et al., 2018). The information published by experienced consumers on the official website makes a imperative influence on tourism businesses and therefore tourism managers are making policies to respond these consumers’ intervention (Casado-Diaz et al., 2018; De Pelsmacker et al., 2018; Kumar & Lata, 2021; Gosseling et al., 2018). Internet has made a unprecedented growth and also act as marketing tool in the hospitality industry also (Ip et al., 2012). The unique characteristics of service industry are separation and intangibility, in which it becomes crucial to make customer’s satisfy (McCole, 2002). Due to rising in competition between private players, online platform is considered as most effective tool to make promotion of product and make healthy relationship with customers.
In this era of competition, most of the hotels have online presence through their own websites (Law and Hsu, 2006). Hotel firms persuade their potential consumers to do reservation by using online method through hotel’s website and it would minimize and control the price (Morosan and Jeong, 2008). Thousands of travalers do hotel booking every year but due to the intangibility of product they consider it as high risk decision as you are not sure about the quality of product (Lin et al., 2009). Thus, the tourists avoid risk through booking only official websites of those hotels established by official bodies and regulary assessed by authorities (Ekinci, 2008). The present generation is quite intelligent to grab the opportunities provided in online bookings of the hotel (Buhalis and Law, 2008) because a well-designed website lure customers to book hotel rooms online(Schmidt et al.,2008). Some hotels published edited testimonials of previous consumers on their hotel websites which influence novice consumer’s intention for hotel booking. Various studies in the past literature have been done on online hotel booking intentions (Danish et al. 2019; Gavilan et al. 2018; Hu & Yang, 2019; Hunold et al. 2018). However, many customers online experience is not satisfactory (Luo et al. 2012). Moreover, the study regarding published information on websites and online booking intention considering etrust as mediator is very limited and travel products complexity hinders the customer for online booking (Dickinger & Mazanec, 2008). Therefore, the study tries to determine how customers perceive the available information on websites and its impact on their online booking intention. Second, to see how etrust as mediator influence the online booking intention. The figure 1 shows the research study flowchart.
Figure 1. Research Flowchart of the Study