Tourism guide cloud service quality: What actually delights customers?

In recent years, tourism has become one of the most profitable and dynamic pillar industries worldwide (Zhou et al. 2014), generating an estimated 11 % of the global gross domestic products and is currently employing 200 million people and serving 700 million tourists globally, a figure which is expected to double by the year 2020 (Amato et al. 2014). Noteworthy, the emergence of advanced IT and cloud technology has beneficially transferred the traditional tourism into currently information-synchronized tourism industry with high extent of freedom, flexibility, and productivity (Zhou et al. 2014). For these advantages, cloud services have been perceived a better solution for meeting customer expectations and enhancing satisfaction (Bilgihan et al. 2011; Chen and Tseng 2013).

On response to tourists’ increasing demands for information, various cloud technology-integrated applications have been developed in different nations, for instance the “Smarter Tourism” and “Smart Tourism Destination” in China (Zhang et al. 2012), the Context Cloud infrastructure in Spain (Martin et al. 2012), the touristic context-aware recommendation system in Italy (Amato et al. 2014). Especially, Tourism Bureau and Institute for Information Industry in Taiwan have implemented the “Smart Tourism Taiwan service platform” and “Map of Taipei Amusement” (MOTA) to provide tourists with sightseeing information and personal intelligent service experiences. These endeavours have in turn created abundant opportunities for promoting cloud services in tourism industry. Nonetheless, despite great efforts in implementing cloud platforms, customers’ actual perspectives toward value-added cloud services have yet been sufficiently understood.

Previous studies on examining cloud services from end-consumer perspectives have commonly applied and extended IT adoption theories such as TAM model (Davis et al. 1989; Venkate sh and Davis 2000) and the IS success model (DeLone and McLean 2004) to explore the relationships among various constructs such as trust, satisfaction, and service convenience (Chen et al. 2015), cost, opportunities and risks (Martens and Teuteberg 2012), cloud service quality (Benlian et al. 2011), and end-users’ motivation, privacy concerns, entrepreneurial orientation, ethics and cloud computing adoption (Ratten 2012). However, the extant literature has stressed that loyalty and other potential factors are important constructs to consider for IT adoption-related studies (Cyr et al. 2006; Flavian et al. 2006).

Nowadays, through cloud services, tourists request information irrespective of time and space by the use of mobile phones or portable devices; additionally, the information has to be personalized according to their real needs (Martin et al. 2012). For this reason, information quality has been suggested to considerably affect users’ satisfaction and continuous use toward a system (Chang and Chen 2008; Chen et al. 2015; DeLone and McLean 2004). Considering function quality, the storage capacity and system functions have been indicated to potentially lead to user dissatisfaction if not fulfilled (Lee et al. 2014). Moreover, since 91 % of unhappy customers may not purchase again and if the system provides timely feedback and appropriate solutions to complaints, approximately 82–95 % of customers may remain with a system (Faed et al. 2014), real feedback has been expected to influence user satisfaction. Furthermore, since multiple visual aids have also been argued to significantly increase dissatisfaction if not well-managed, customers’ sensory experience toward interface visual design has been proposed to be critical to their continuous use (Lorenzo-Romero et al. 2013; Tuch et al. 2010). On elaborating, in recent IT-related studies, a hedonic component namely ‘‘fun’’, ‘‘playfulness’’, or ‘‘enjoyment’’ has been incorporated to the TAM model in order to better explore user pleasure toward utilizing a system (Chung and Tan 2004; Cyr et al. 2006; Moon and Kim 2001). Finally, based on the DeLone and McLean IS success model, many studies have advocated that satisfaction can boost customer loyalty (Bayraktar et al. 2012; Lee et al. 2014; Siddiqi 2011). It has been additionally suggested that resolving the dissatisfaction will restore customers’ faith and loyalty (Daft and Lengel 1986). Nonetheless, despite potential relationships among these dimensions, few researches have emphatically investigated these relationships in the field of tourism cloud application. To bridge this gap, this study attempts to take Taiwan tourism industry to propose a tourism cloud-satisfaction and loyalty model by integrating the TAM model and the refined IS success model to investigate which factors of cloud services (i.e. information quality, function quality, real feedback, multiple visual aids, and enjoyment) actually delight customer satisfaction and loyalty. With the achieved findings, this study hopes to provide future research and industrial managers with helpful references of customer use behaviours and useful guidelines for enhancing cloud service quality in order to achieve better development and competitiveness.

With the integration of tourism industry and cloud services, this study expects to provide considerable academic and practical contributions to the extant literature. Firstly, in spite of the fact that TAM and Delone and McLean IS models have been widely applied to explore customer satisfaction and use loyalty, focuses are mainly on ordinary IT platforms and in popular industry sectors such as e-commerce (Chen et al. 2015; Kim and Kankanhalli 2009), e-banking (Siddiqi 2011), mobile phone sector (Bayraktar et al. 2012), hospitality (Bilgihan et al. 2011), electronics usage (Chang and Chen 2008), and logistics and transport (Faed et al. 2014). A missing in in-depth investigations on the trendy cloud computing technology and tourism industry has been noticed. Second, despite recent attempts in examining cloud services in tourism industry, a brief review has revealed that cloud computing technology has been mainly paid attention to possible applications in establishing innovative systems such as the context-aware recommendation service system for supporting tourists’ path planning (Amato et al. 2014), the tourism guide context-aware mobile services (Martin et al. 2012), or e-tourism low-cost airline systems for backpacking (Zhou et al. 2014). Again, research missing is acknowledged concerning knowledge of cloud services’ attributes and their consequent impacts on users’ adoption and use loyalty since an IT platform cannot be designed and operated well without sufficient understanding of its characteristics. Therefore, this study with the holistic view on cloud service quality attributes from reliable perspectives of tourists has beneficially provided sufficient understanding of what factor actually delights customers, which in turn brings about significance in contributions in comparison with the extant literature.

The remainders of this study continue with a review of tourism cloud development and dimensions of cloud services that are expected to have impacts on tourists’ overall satisfaction and loyalty in second section. Third sections presents data collection, construct measures, and research methodology, followed by statistical results in fourth section. In-depth managerial insights, discussions, and conclusions are stated in fifth section. This study ends with research limitations and future recommendations in sixth section.

In this customer-oriented era, to any service platform, the matters of how to improve, maintain, and manage the effective operation in order to keep current customers and capture potential users is the key issue for its sustainability. Overall, the results indicated that the most critical factor that affects loyalty of Tourism guide cloud service is enjoyment, followed by function quality, multiple visual aids, and information quality. On other hand, overall satisfaction effectively mediate Information quality, Function Quality, Multiple Visual Aids, and Enjoyment and significantly enhance loyalty of Tourism guide cloud service. These findings have beneficially suggested that service providers in designing and planning tourism guide cloud service platform should pay more attention to these aspects as well as manage them effectively once attempting to grasp customers’ satisfaction and use loyalty. In case the platform lacks of any of these aspects or there exist unsatisfactory issues, more investments for implementation and improvement are recommended.

With the achieved findings, this study has effectively extended the literature by investigating deeply the features of each factor, not just general understanding. As the most critical factor is enjoyment, users would be more excited and motivated in using a system once perceiving the system is fun and enjoyable (Chung and Tan 2004; Cyr et al. 2006; Moon and Kim 2001), the features of being “pleasant”, “attractive and full of curiosity”, and “interesting in content” have been well perceived to be critical to the success of tourism guide cloud services throughout the survey. Based on these premises, it is strongly suggested that guide cloud service providers should emphatically develop the playfulness and pleasure features during the stages of designing and planning the systems in order to better capture users’ positive attitude and interests.

Furthermore, function quality, multiple visual aids, and information quality are also important factors. In previous research concerning IT platforms, function quality has been examined through system’s storage capacity (Burda and Teuteberg 2014; Lee et al. 2014) and system functions such as effective usability, availability, reliability, and adaptability (Chen et al. 2015; DeLone and McLean 2004). This study is based on real demands of tourists in using guide cloud services has recognized that among the survey items, tourism guide cloud services’ capabilities in providing real-time information concerning traffic situations, points of interest and convenient stores as well as offering map navigation services have been considered important. Additionally, the abilities of instantly grasping messages related to sightseeing and helpful assistance as well as guiding references in trip planning are also the essential elements for customers in choosing tourism guide cloud services. For the fact that users tend to be dissatisfied once the platform cannot fulfill customers’ demands on these aspects, service providers are suggested to make more efforts in ensuring these features in order to maintain and enhance customer satisfaction and use intention.

Noteworthy, overall satisfaction is the mediated factor between Multiple Visual Aids and loyalty of Tourism guide cloud service. It is noted aforementioned that there remains the debate regarding the impacts of multiple visual aids on customer satisfaction in the extant literature between significant (Cyr et al. 2006; Lorenzo-Romero et al. 2013; Rosen and Purinton 2004; Tuch et al. 2010) and non-significant (Lee et al. 2014). Therefore, this finding has interestingly provided several academic contributions to the existing debate on the role of visual attraction-attributes and user interface design of cloud systems toward customer satisfaction. With this result, this study beneficially recommends cloud system providers and tourism managers to take multiple visual aids into deeper account once aiming to capture tourists’ satisfaction in using cloud services.

Surprisingly, real feedback is found to have non-significant influence on user satisfaction, which is contrast to previous studies that system’s fast-response feedback toward users’ complaints or requirements significantly promotes customer satisfaction (DeLone and McLean 2004) and that cloud system’s real-time travel assistances can increase customer satisfaction through presenting the latest information relevant to tourists’ needs and motivating their conversations with other users (Lee et al. 2014). In this study, it can be explained that since the shift from traditional IS services to cloud services is still in the early stage (Park and Ryoo 2013), it is hard for cloud tourism service providers to actually capture tourists’ feedback and expectation, thus its impact on customer satisfaction has yet been efficient.

As aforementioned, this study through innovatively integrating tourism industry and cloud services attempts to investigate which factors of cloud services (i.e. information quality, function quality, real feedback, multiple visual aids, and enjoyment) actually delight customer satisfaction and loyalty. In general, the results prove significantly positive effects of function quality, enjoyment, multiple visual aids, and information quality of cloud services on users’ overall satisfaction. Therefore, in order to increase tourists’ satisfaction and loyalty, it is essential for tourism guide cloud service providers and industrial managers to be satisfying brands and systems with which tourists can be able to feel favourably disposed. Managers are also recommended to be deeply concerned about tourists’ service expectations and feedback concerning these aspects for better motivating their satisfaction and loyalty.

As revealed, enjoyment plays the most critical role, followed by function quality and multiple visual aids, implying their crucial roles in determining customers’ satisfaction and loyalty, thus suggesting cloud system operators and industrial managers to strategically strengthen cloud platform’s conduct joyful tourism activities and function quality to maintain and enhance customers’ satisfaction and enjoyment toward the use of cloud services. As such, continuous use of cloud systems in tourism can be considerably ensured.

With the achieved findings, this study has beneficially provided several considerable academic and practical contributions to the extant literature with an extension of cloud service platforms in the field of tourism industry, which is originally a missing gap in previous research. As such, cloud services are not only understood in terms of their possible applications but also in the practical aspects needed by customers and the service gaps for improvement. Simultaneously, with the obtained real key factors, this study hopes to provide future research, academicians in relevant fields, and cloud service managers and providers with helpful references of research items of customer real needs and guidelines for enhancing tourism guide service quality in order to achieve better sustainable competitiveness.