International Journal of Innovative Technology and Exploring Engineering (IJITEE)
ISSN: 2278-3075, Volume-9 Issue-3, January 2020
3118
Published By:
Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering
& Sciences Publication
Retrieval Number: B7661129219/2020©BEIESP
DOI: 10.35940/ijitee.B7661.019320
Abstract: In the current era of globalisation, the Internet
plays a major role in people’s lives. It has also altered the style of
people travel by providing a cheaper, more convenient and more
efficient price. Recognising the broad impact of travel
applications on the travel sector, researchers have focused on the
study of determinants of travellers’ intention to utilise travel apps.
In addition, among the consumer behaviour models used to study
the tourism sector, is Unified Acceptance and Use of Technology
(UTAUT) model which is the common and new models nowadays.
Therefore, the existing study is expected at evaluating the local
residents’ intention to utilise mobile travel applications based on
the UTAUT model. The self-administered questionnaire was
distributed to 390 of Malaysian millennial which the IBM SPSS
24 version was selected for the data analysis. The study
demonstrated that the variables of UTAUT are related to
behavioural intention. This study contributes to new perspectives
on mobile application usage and preferences, especially in the
context of tourism. It also offers practical application implications
for mobile application developers for the design of mobile app
features, most likely for tourists.
Keywords: Mobile Apps; Unified Acceptance and Use of
Technology; Intention; Malaysian; Technology
I. INTRODUCTION
In today’s era of globalisation, the Internet plays a major
part in people’s lives. According to the data from the [14],
more than half of the global population uses the Internet on a
daily basis. Many facets of people’s lives have been
transformed by the Internet, and the travel sector is of no
exception in which rapid technological developments have
changed the operations of the industry mainly in terms of the
interactions between businesses and consumers [21]. Mobile
technology’s rapid growth, deployment, and use has
transformed the manner of interactions between travel
Revised Manuscript Received on January 5, 2020
* Correspondence Author
Nurzehan Abu Bakar, Faculty of Hospitality, Tourism & Wellness,
Universiti Malaysia Kelantan, Malaysia. Email: nurzehan.ab@umk.edu.my
Nik Alif Amri Nik Hashim*, Faculty of Hospitality, Tourism &
Wellness, Universiti Malaysia Kelantan, Malaysia. Email:
nikalifamri@gmail.com
Nor Maizana Mat Nawi, Faculty of Hospitality, Tourism & Wellness,
Universiti Malaysia Kelantan, Malaysia. Email: maizana.mn@umk.edu.my
Marlisa Abdul Rahim, Faculty of Hospitality, Tourism & Wellness,
Universiti Malaysia Kelantan, Malaysia Email: marlisa@umk.edu.my
Abdullah Muhamed Yusoff, Faculty of Hospitality, Tourism &
Wellness, Universiti Malaysia Kelantan, Malaysia. Email:
abdullah.my@umk.edu.my
Roslizawati Che Aziz, Faculty of Hospitality, Tourism & Wellness,
Universiti Malaysia Kelantan, Malaysia. Email: roslizawati@umk.edu.my
Ghazali Ahmad, Faculty of Hospitality, Tourism & Wellness,
Universiti Malaysia Kelantan, Malaysia. Email: ghazali@umk.edu.my
companies and their clients. Mobile app for travel has
changed and changed the way travellers travel today and how
travel companies reach their customers. The impact of the
travel mobile app is undeniable among millennials,
adventurers, or experimenters alike. However, even though
mobile applications offer many advantages and are in trend,
[1] reported that the majority of tourists (above 50%) prefer
not to use those apps. Only a small percentage of travellers
use their mobile phones to book their vacations and purchase
flight tickets instead of doing this via the online web site on
PC [24]. This is supported by a study conducted by [9], 65%
of travellers turn to mobile sites for travel from 58% of apps
used for travel activities. The traveller was reluctant to use
travel mobile apps via mobile devices as they feel the apps are
not useful or take up too much memory [9].
Moreover, the majority of traveller in the market are not
frequent traveller, they only travel occasionally thus, they are
reluctant to download travel app onto their phone as they only
use a booking service at most a few times each year [5]. On
the other hand, the type of travellers also influenced the usage
of the app, for instance, millennials travellers only opting for
the cheapest option such as kayak and Airbnb when making
travel arrangement. They do not prefer high-end apps such as
American Airlines, United Airlines, and Marriott as
millennials might have limited travel budgets at the moment
as they have just started embarking work industry [3].
Looking at the above issues, this research is prompted to
explore the determinants of travel mobile applications’ usage
among travellers. Furthermore, very few past studies had
examined the intention of travellers to utilise mobile travel
apps. The majority of the existing literature only looked at the
adoption of apps in M-banking [16] and M-commerce [8],
while the tourism sector was left largely unexplored.
Therefore, this study is interested to investigate travellers’
intention to use mobile travel applications because of the vast
opportunity it offers as well as the limited studies done in this
area [15]; [17], with a special focus on Malaysian travellers.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
The theory of reasoned action (TRA), technology
acceptance model (TAM) as well as theory of planned
behaviour (TPB), have been used by past scholars to examine
the acceptance and consumer intention to use technology
[4];[26]. Yet, [30] combined several different psychological
and sociological theories, such as TPB, TAM, TRA,
Travel Mobile Applications: the Use of Unified
Acceptance Technology Model
Nurzehan Abu Bakar, Nik Alif Amri Nik Hashim, Nor Maizana Mat Nawi, Marlisa Abdul
Rahim, Abdullah Muhamed Yusoff, Roslizawati Che Aziz, Ghazali Ahmad