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The use of mobile applications has boomed in the market and has become an observable trend with regard to consumers (Im & Hancer, 2016). According to a report published by Statista (2020a), consumers downloaded 116 billion mobile apps to their connected devices in 2019. This figure is projected to grow in 2024 to reach 184 billion app downloads.
Thus, professionals in various sectors of activity (Hew et al., 2016) rushed to offer their own applications. For instance, in the hospitality and tourism industry, mobile marketing devices are very helpful for both consumers and travel mangers as consumers can collect information about travel, tourism offers; and managers can better present and promote their products and services (Kuo et al., 2019). In fact, hospitality and tourism companies have offered a wide range of mobile applications to customers allowing them to access information, products and services using their mobile devices (Liebana-Cabanillas et al., 2020; Litvin et al., 2017).
Although mobile apps represent an important potential for both consumers and businesses ’success, they have received little academic attention within literature on the study of the tourism industry (Tan et al., 2017). Specifically, published literature on understanding the tourist’s intentions to use mobile apps for travel purposes is still scarce (Gupta et al., 2018).
In fact, works interested in conceptual frameworks as well as researches on theories related to the technology of mobile applications show, on the one hand, that despite some recent researches that tend to provide a more holistic approach by taking a broader perspective to study tourism offerings via mobile apps, these researches are still in short supply and further investigations are required (Tan et al., 2017); and on the other hand, a lack of consumer-related studies as far as consumer motivations to adopt applications for tourism products and services remain limited (Kuo et al., 2019). For example, few studies have evaluated the relationship between constructs such as WOM about the app and personal innovativeness on tourists’ attitudes and intentions towards using tourism apps (Kuo et al., 2019). Thus, this study aims to explore the factors that influence the use of tourism mobile applications, including WOM and personal innovativeness based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM).
This research contributes to enriching the mobile apps adoption literature in the specific context of hospitality and tourism industry and helps practitioners to take advantage of the use of mobile applications in order to develop effective marketing strategies by providing users with applications adapted to their needs. Furthermore, this study also offers a modest contribution to the literature of tourism mobile applications from an emerging market perspective as the empirical investigation was conducted in a developing country.
The paper is organised as follows: First, the theoretical framework and the hypotheses of the study are exposed. The method along with empirical analyses and discussions of findings follow thereafter. The last section, provides the conclusion with limitations and suggestions of avenues for future research.