Article Brick or Click? Channel Choice Disruptions in Travel Industry Sahil Singh Jasrotia 1 H. G. Mishra 2 Surabhi Koul 3 Abstract In the current era of digital infusion, customer behaviour is highly fluctuating. This has resulted retailers to be in a confused situation. The current need of the situation is to understand this change in customer behaviour and strategise accordingly. The purpose of the current study is to investigate the drivers of the channel choice, in relevance to travel industry. The study presents a conceptual model that reflects the antecedents to customer channel choice in travel industry. The article is based on a qualitative research analysis using semi-structured interviews to systematically collect and analyse the data. A sample of 25 retailers and 27 customers were selected and interviewed. A grounded theory approach has been adopted to generate a conceptual model. The article identifies several antecedents to channel choice in travel industry. Factors such as customer awareness, urgency of purchase, promotions and facilities have been highlighted and elaborated through the three-staged coding process. The other antecedents of the channel choice that have been highlighted through the verbatim are catchment area, family influences and affordability. In travel industry, channel structures have been well-studied. These studies dominantly focus on the players of the channel or the role of the middleman. The current study is unique in the way it explores the channel choice of customers after understanding both the extremes of the channel, that is, retailers and the customers. Also the methodology used is unique in its own way. Keywords Channel choice, grounded theory, multichannel retailing, travel, digital disruption 1 Indian Institute of Management Indore, Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India. 2 Faculty of Management, Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, College of Management, Katra, Jammu and Kashmir, India. 3 Marketing, SVKM’s Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. Corresponding author: Sahil Singh Jasrotia, Indian Institute of Management, Indore, Rau, Pithampur, Indore 453556, Madhya Pradesh, India. E-mail: sahils@iimidr.ac.in Introduction In recent era, we have witnessed more digitisation (Leeflang, Verhoef, Dahlström, & Freundt, 2014), and emergence of digital platforms has led to a shift of pure offline to multi- channel platforms. A trend pointed out by Chakravarthi Narasimhan that channels are blurring highlights that it is really difficult to identify pure digital or physical channel players. This is because the way customers are behaving towards these changes is abrupt. The way the shoppers are behaving is continuously changing. Researchers are trying to analyse these reactions and thus the research on omnichan- nel retail environment is picking up pace. Recently a special issue of Journal of Retailing classifies the research in omnichannel into three groups: (a) impact of channels on performance, (b) shopper behaviour across channels and (c) retail mix across channels. The scope of the current article is to evaluate the channel choice phenomenon of customers in travel and tourism industry. In a country like India where the number of foreign tourist’s arrivals were 8.8 million in 2016, domestic and foreign combined tourist visits in 2015 were 1431.97 million with an annual growth of 11.6 per cent and reached to 1613.55 million in 2016 further increasing by 12.68 per cent (India Tourism Statistics, 2017). Travel Industry is one of the fastest growing industry in India. With the introduction of many online players such as MakeMyTrip (MMT) and Goibibo.com, the travel convenience has increased to a greater extent. In a digital era where from travel planning to implementation is all online now, the overall time taken by the customer to plan the travel has reduced to a greater extent. And not only the Asia-Pacific Journal of Management Research and Innovation 15(1–2) 16–26, 2019 © 2019 Asia-Pacific Institute of Management Reprints and permissions: in.sagepub.com/journals-permissions-india DOI: 10.1177/2319510X19829308 journals.sagepub.com/home/abr