Evangelos CHRISTOU

A qualitative analysis of consumer attitudes on adoption of online travel services

Abstract:
The study reported in this paper explores consumers' experiences with technology-assisted service encounters by investigating the applicability of Mick and Fournier's paradoxes of techno-logy adoption to the online travel agents' services scenario. In-depth interviews were conducted to explore consumers' experiences when using travel agents' online services and the results were compared to those of Mick and Fournier. The findings are similar, suggesting that when consu-mers adopt online technology they can simultaneously develop positive and negative attitudes. The findings of this study also suggest that the nature of some of the paradoxes experienced by consumers may depend on the industry (travel industry in this study) and the technology (the Internet in this study) being investigated; consumers can develop multiple attitudes towards certain source elements, resulting in existence of contradictory views and attitudes. In terms of Mick and Fournier's paradoxes, the findings of this study indicate that when consumers use technology assisted service encounters for travel agents' services they are most likely to experi-ence control/chaos, freedom/enslavement, competence/incompetence, efficiency/ inefficiency, engaging/disengaging, assimilation/isolation paradoxes and least likely to experience the new/obsolete paradox.