Assessing the Factors that Drive Consumers’ Intention to Continue Using Online Travel Agencies : A Heuristic-systematic Model Perspective

Abstract

As the growth of online travel agencies (hereafter OTAs) accelerates, competition among hotels to gain exposure on the first page of OTA websites, and the financial burden, such as commissions hotels have to pay in return, are increasing. Therefore, to facilitate successful management in the tourism industry, it is important to establish what makes people continue the practice of using OTAs to book rooms in hotels and other accommodation outlets. By adopting the heuristic-systematic model (HSM), this study explores the factors that drive consumers’ continued use of OTA and classifies them into heuristic cues (brand awareness, cost saving, and scarcity message) and systematic cues (recommendation quality and the ability to provide reputation). Furthermore, we divided the sample based on the location of hotels within and outside Korea, and investigated the different roles of the cues between two models. The results are expected to provide theoretical and practical implications for both OTAs and hotels.