Facilitators of Online Hotel Booking through Third Party Aggregators: Measurement and Validation in the Indian Context

ABSTRACT

The Indian hotel industry is likely to reach USD 2.3 billion by 2020 with 28% (up from 19% in 2018) of all bookings made online. The extant research in this field has been mainly focused on the technical and esthetic aspects of hotel websites. Drawing on information richness literature, we identify and develop customer-centric informative factors (named Facilitators of Online Booking or FOB) that might facilitate online hotel booking. We deployed a two-stage mixed-method study across major tourist destinations in India. In the first stage (n₁ = 202), we developed an 18-item scale to measure FOB. In the second stage (n₂ = 330), we tested the construct validity of FOB and found support for its relationships with e-trust (as a mediator) and purchase intention.

KEYWORDS:

• Online Hotel Booking
• e-Trust
• online-purchase intention
• mediation
• scale development

Acknowledgments

We are immensely grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions on the earlier version of this paper.