Abstract
Online channel has redefined the way businesses were conducted and many e-travel firms were the first to exemplify. The purpose of this paper is to determine the key factors that influence consumers’ intention to adopt online channel for train travel. The extended model incorporates the basic ingredients of TAM, TPB and Shim’s model along with several external variables such as trust, convenience and involvement. Data were collected from 514 online travel customers. In the first phase, structural equation modeling was employed to determine the significant variables and in the second phase, the neural network model was used to rank the relative importance of the significant predictors identified by SEM. The results indicated that Trust, Perceived Usefulness, Convenience and Website as significant factors. Among significant ones, neural networks suggested “convenience” as the highest importance. The study indicates few marketing approaches that can help travel service providers to formulate optimal marketing strategies.
Highlights
With new technological advancements and highly demanding customers, companies have been equipping themselves to provide superior customer experience as this being one of the main objectives in an online environment [1]
Brand recognition, Website look and feel, Navigation, Payment related issues, Presence of third party certification on website, Product description, About Us Page, Order tracking, Terms & conditions, Money back guarantee, Customer reviews, Pop-up Ads, Logistics, Secure connection, Download time, Domain name, Discounts [44] along with relative advantages [45] influence online adoption or online purchase intention. Given such an impact website features have on online travel adoption, we propose the following hypothesis: H1: Website features have significant and positive effect on Adoption Intention of online train travel
Since the impact of trust is found critical towards online purchase intention and with few studies focusing on general online shopping, we propose the following hypothesis with respect to online train travel adoption
Summary
With new technological advancements and highly demanding customers, companies have been equipping themselves to provide superior customer experience as this being one of the main objectives in an online environment [1]. Internet usage, higher the online shopping adoption [3]. While consumer usage of the Internet for shopping is increasing, fewer people than anticipated purchase through the Internet [8]. Despite Indian railways adopting innovative means of promoting online ticketing, adoption is still not great and it’s just around 58% and the effort is to increase purchase of e-tickets [10]. With untiring attempts of IRCTC to shift all the consumers to online channel, it’s important to explore the factors that influence the online ticketing adoption, as it would help travel service providers to create appropriate marketing strategies, leading to higher online adoption rates [11]
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