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DOCTORAL DISSERTATION SUMMARY: Modelling intentions for online reservations in hotel industry

Purpose Over the last twenty years, information and communication technologies have completely changed the way hotel companies do business and the behaviour of tourists. The Internet has become the most important sales channel in the hotel industry, and tourists have become "experts" in searching, communicating and buying tourism products and services. The importance of understanding the online tourists' behaviour is extremely important for hotel companies, travel agencies, tourist destinations, but also for other stakeholders in the tourism sector. Online tourist behaviour is an extremely complex research area in which both the tourists and the environment itself are changing extremely rapidly. A number of interrelated factors influence the online tourist behaviour. Online reservations are one of the fastest growing segments of online sales. The two main channels of online hotel sales are online travel agencies (OTA) and directly through hotel websites. Over the last decade, these two distribution channels have been fighting for market share and despite all the efforts of hotel companies to increase direct bookings, OTA still holds a dominant position in the market. The reason for this may be that OTA invests considerable resources in managing and improving the online customer experience, while hotels use their websites primarily to present hotel content and information. A comprehensive literature review has revealed a lack of studies investigating the relationship between website quality, online customer experience and booking intentions, which are the main research concepts of this doctoral thesis. The main objectives of the doctoral thesis are: to examine the existing theoretical knowledge in the field of the observed research concepts, to develop a conceptual model to measure the influence of website quality on online experience and booking intentions, to investigate the reliability and validity of the model on two independent samples, and to test the proposed hypotheses. Existing studies have largely concentrated on examining customers' online travel purchases based on theories and models that use a cognitive approach to predict customer behaviour (such as the Technology Acceptance Model, the Theory of Reasoned Action, the Theory of Planned Behaviour). These have often been criticised for not providing sufficient theoretical support to explain the affective side of customer behaviour. Recently, Moon et al. (2017) stated that researchers could use the stimulus- organismresponse model (S-O-R) to better predict and explain the intentions of online shopping. Therefore, based on the relevant literature on tourism and consumer behaviour, this study proposes a conceptual model based on the S-O-R paradigm (Mehrabian & Russell, 1974) to measure the influence of website quality on the online customer experience and future booking intentions. The stimulus in the proposed conceptual model is the website quality. The model proposes that website quality will positively and significantly influence the cognitive and affective online customer experience (organism), which will ultimately have a positive and significant impact on future booking intentions.

website quality ; online customer experience ; future behavioural intentions ; modelling ; stimulus-organism-response model (S-O-R)

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