Extending the Technology Acceptance Model to Examine the Intention to Use Tourism Applications on Smartphone

The advent of tourism applications has changed tour patterns through making it easy to access information intourism industry. This study extends the tourism acceptance model (TAM) by introducing two determinants,perceived enjoyment and perceived cost savings, to better explain and predict users’ behavioral intentions to usetourism applications specifically in regard to specific age groups who are active travelers and heavy smartphoneowners. In order to conduct empirical research, an online survey on smartphone was carried out by mobile researchservice, ‘OpenSurvey’, and data from 300 participants were analyzed by structural equation modeling (SEM). Theresults show that the impact of perceived usefulness and perceived cost savings on behaviour intention is greater thanperceived enjoyment and perceived ease of use. Perceived ease of use has little direct effect on intention to usetourism applications but indirectly influences through perceived usefulness. Perceived cost savings in time, effortsand monetary value have significant influences on the decision of using tourism applications, but the fun-aspect ofapplications does not greatly help to affect behavior intention. This study offers some practical implications fortourism marketing as a tourism travel tool.