Abstract
Modern travelers prefer an easy and enjoyable experience upon travelling. According to several surveys, over 25% of respondents have installed mobile travel apps on their smartphone. Basically, the travel app is used to search and book flights or accommodation, while download and install the app is mainly to receive notification on the updated trip status and also for accessing app offline. Therefore, it's essential for tourism organization to emphasize on traveler preferences and new innovated technology could offer for competitive advantages in tourism industry. Generation Y grew up with technology and it constitutes 44% of population in Malaysia. Therefore, this research is focus on Generation Y in Malaysia, based on the UTAUT2 (Consumer Acceptance and Use of Information Technology) model to explore and predict the factors influencing the intention to use mobile travel apps. A total of 245 questionnaires were distributed to all states in Malaysia. Quantitative data were analyzed using IBM SPSS 22.0 and Smart PLS 3.0 software. The results findings show that performance expectancy has the highest significant relationship on behavioral to use mobile travel apps. It was followed by facilitating conditions and habit. Factors of effort expectancy, social influence, hedonic motivation and price value don't have much effect on individual's behavioral intention to use mobile travel apps. The theoretical, managerial and practical implications of these results are discussed.
TopIntroduction
Mobile apps is a software applications running on a handheld devices such as smart phones and tablets which is easy to use, downloadable and can be accessed from anywhere and in anytime. Some apps are pre-installed in phone and could be downloaded to use under offline environment. Nowadays, it is very common for people using mobile apps to contact friends, internet browsing, research on products, travel planning, document management, entertainment, online reservation, etc. Mobile apps also play an important role in business where many company using it for their daily business transactions and the most frequent is to keep contact with their customers.
Mobile apps are one of the promotion tools for company to advertise their services or products for attracting people to purchase their services or products in getting more revenue. Besides that, Mobile apps also have a great effect in today society because by adoption of it could help people easily communicate with each other, save time and also increase the productivity during travel. In addition, it also helps people save cost by making international call through mobile VoIP apps (Global Market Application Market, 2010).
According to an article written by Luca and released by Fortune dated Feb 3, 2016, it reveals the four interesting points of travel trends in upcoming (Luca, 2016). The new term “Bleisure Travel” refers to the mixing between business travel and pleasure travel. Technology advancement makes it possible by providing a way for people attain a better work-life balance because carry out the work on a beach is no longer a dream. The entire trip can be immaculately organized from booking flights, hotels, cars, restaurants, interest places, unique experiences so that people would not wasting their time and energy along the journey.
Although most of the travelers intends to release from any technology during travel but you would found that the mobile is the most part to stay connected for keeping pleasure along the journey. Everything from travel plan such as flight details, city maps, sharing information and uber access are not escapable from the mobile usage. In addition, it also keeps connectivity with client on business matters along the journey. Research study found that there were 45% of travelers use their mobile for trip booking, 72% use their mobile to look for restaurants and 34% prefer mobile hotel check-in service (Luca, 2016). The travel booking through mobile platform becomes the second most popular after the desktop: 45% using mobile for booking activities while 55% stay using desktop. Thus, it concluded that the trends of the travel mobile apps usage become very common because more and more travelers rely on it to do their travel plan.
In Malaysia, Generation Y makes up the largest segment of Malaysia’s population which accounts for 11 million people in 2010 with approximately 40% of Malaysia’s population (Department of Statistics Malaysia, 2011). Based on the population pyramids of the world from 1950 to 2100, categorization of Malaysia’s population based on age: 9.6% were 20 – 24 years old, 9.5% were 25 – 29 years old, 9.2% were 30 – 34 years old, make up total 28.3% with 8.7 million population (the biggest portion) out of Malaysia population 30.75 million in year 2016 (Figure 1).
Figure 1.
Population pyramids of the world from 1950 to 2100
Key Terms in this Chapter
Habit: Natural behavior of an individual which could be viewed in two different perspectives: an earlier behavior and automatic behavior.
Hedonic Motivation: Degree of an individual perceived enjoyment using a technology, despite the performance consequences.
Effort Expectancy: Degree of ease associated with the use of particular system.
Price Value: The trade-off between the cost of using the technology and the perceived benefits.
Performance Expectancy: Degree of an individual believes that using particular system will improve their performance and bringing benefits in performing activities.
Behavioral Intention: Indicate of an individual’s readiness to perform a given behavior and normally consider as immediate antecedent of behavior.
Social Influence: Degree of an individual perceived that important others such as family members and friends believe that they should use a particular technology.
Facilitating conditions: Degree of an individual believes that an organizational and technical infrastructure exists to support use of system.