Determinants of behavioral intention to use the Personalized Location-based Mobile Tourism Application: An empirical study by integrating TAM with ISSM

Abstract

With the advent of the two-day weekend and improvements in the public transit system, people have begun to focus on leisure activities. When the YouBike public bicycle system was installed in the city of Taichung, Taiwan, it created a convenient transportation system network that was set up perfectly for a tremendous impact on the local tourism industry. This has happened in parallel with the development and proliferation of smartphones and wireless networks. The functions of mobile applications (“apps”) have become more powerful over time, allowing people to access travel information and share their experiences almost instantaneously. Since a smartphone’s positioning system can be used to provide more personalized information and services, the development trend is heading toward location-based services (LBSs) that can bring the app’s functionality closer to the needs of the user.This study develops a personalized location-based mobile tourism application (PLMTA) for travel planning. The PLMTA combines hybrid filtering technology with the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm to make more efficient customized tourism recommendations. It allows users to more effectively search through travel information and arrange their trip. This study also integrates the technology acceptance model (TAM) and the information system success model (ISSM) to present a research model that explores users’ intention to use the PLMTA. The questionnaire survey method is used to collect our data, and the hypotheses are tested via structural equation modeling (SEM). The results show that information quality, perceived ease of use, and perceived usefulness significantly affect the intention to use PLMTA, while information quality and perceived convenience are found to have an influence on perceived usefulness. Information quality, system quality, and perceived convenience are found to significantly affect perceived ease of use, which consequently affects the intention to use the system.