Tourists’ work-related smartphone use at the tourist destination: making an otherwise impossible trip possible

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study examines the under-examined but frequently observed phenomenon of tourists combining work and leisure while travelling and the role that smartphones play. We considered through the lens of leisure constraint concept and viewed work-related smartphone use at a tourist destination as a leisure constraint negotiation strategy. We also considered the antecedents of work-related leisure constraints, negotiation-efficacy, fear of missing out on the latest work-related development, and travel motivation, and the consequence of tourist experience with experiential familiarity as the moderator. Partial least squares (PLS) method and PLS multigroup analyzes were used to analyze the data collected from 267 Taiwanese tourists (135 and 132 had visited the destination once and more than once, respectively). The analysis shows that work-related leisure constraints and fear of missing out invoke the negotiation strategy of smartphone use for work-related purposes. Interestingly, such negotiation strategies increase escapist experiences for tourists. This study implies that using a smartphone for work-related purposes is a compromise made by tourists, and such a compromise may not be entirely bad. It allows the tourists to tour the destination and simultaneously work on-and-off when working is unavoidable.