The effects of the mobile tourism website quality on customer intention to reuse and recommend

The widespread mobile technology usage is becoming influential in travellers’ decisions and behaviour, consequently drawing considerable attention from researchers including the influences of mobile apps’ quality, the prerequisites to enhance customer satisfaction and ultimately building customer loyalty. However, the high attrition rate renders customer loyalty questionable for travel apps since an average travel app loses more than half of its users within a month. There is limited academic research on the reuse and recommend of the use of mobile travel websites. This research bridges the literature gap by applying the updated Delone and McLean Information System Success Model to identify the factors affecting consumers’ perception of mobile tourism website service quality. Moreover, this study investigates the differences in consumer’s intention to reuse and recommend. The study adopts a mixed research method including a comprehensive literature review of tourism website quality evaluation, individual interviews and survey about post-purchase behavioural intentions influenced by mobile website quality. Results from 330 online survey responses reveal that the conceptualisation of mobile website quality has no significant differences across online travel agencies and direct suppliers. For mobile website quality, factors of information have stronger impact to service than system quality. Likewise, the findings of mobile consumers suggest that in their post-purchase behavioural intentions, consumers’ high tendency to reuse other websites from the same firm was not equivalent to their recommendations. This research offers both academic and practical contributions. Academically, with the majority of studies separately examining website quality from three constructs of information, system and service qualities, this study initially proposed that mobile website quality should be examined by service quality which presents the overall information system success and is affected by information and system qualities. Secondly, this study also proposes a formative model to assess mobile tourism website quality by demonstrating its relationship with post-purchase behavioural intentions. Hence, this study has implications to formative studies in the digital marketing literature. Practically for the industries, it presents recommendations on the improvements of mobile website quality and mobile consumer’s post-purchase behavioural intentions to reuse and recommend. This study also provides directions for companies to improve their current mobile websites and strategies to promote them