Tourist satisfaction with personalised information service

Abstract

The rapid integration of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in everyday life and customer travel experience, increase tourist expectations towards the capabilities of travel services to satisfy their immediate needs. In the context of high volumes of heterogeneous travel information, it becomes critical for the industry to provide tourists with highly relevant solutions that would simplify tourist decision-making and enable time savings. Personalisation of information services has been widely recognised as one of the emerging tourist requirements. It also leads organisations to adopt corresponding business strategies to remain competitive in the tourism market. However, the implementation of personalisation is associated with the increased risks of customer frustration, related to the lost customer control and perceived insecurity to personal data application. The existing research is the domain of tourist service personalisation is heavily influenced by the assumption that the match between service characteristics and the needs, that motivate the customers to interact with the service, determines customer experience. Such assumption drives the development of new methods, aimed at advancing the context recognition and customer segmentation in order to enable service personalisation. However, the comprehensive explanation of the role that the whole scope of tourist interactions with the personalised information service have on their experience, is still missing. To fill the gap, this study aims at explaining the way how personalised information service characteristics affect tourist perceptions on the service performance, value and overall satisfaction. This thesis integrates service-centric and customer-centric frameworks of service performance. It redefines them under the perspective of Service-Dominant Logic and proposes a comprehensive model of tourist satisfaction with personalised information service. Guided by pragmatism, it accepts three-phases sequential qualitative-quantitative research design. To propose a conceptual framework, the research conducts conceptual literature review. To explain tourist reasoning towards value co-creation by personalised information service, to determine appropriate indicators for operationalising co-created service performance and value, the study triangulates the results of the qualitative semi-structured interviews. To refine the proposed measurements and validate the hypothesised model, the study applies quantitative analysis of the online customer survey results. The main findings demonstrate that different functional characteristics of the personalised information service make different contribution to value co-creation, satisfaction and loyalty. Rather than focusing solely on performance of the personalised content, tourists attribute primary importance to the smooth interactions with the information system (IS) interface and to the presence of control over the personalised content and interactions with the system, followed by the personalised content and customer service support. The perceptions on co-created personalised information service performance have major effect on satisfaction directly and indirectly via co-created value. Managing the dimensions of the co-created value with the primary focus on utilitarian and experiential components is identified as more efficient way to increase tourist satisfaction rather than managing the processes of the service provider and tourist resources integration. The findings create original contributions to the Service-Dominant Logic, service management and user experience. First, this thesis expands Service-Dominant Logic by redefining performance of the information service as being co-created alongside with value. It operationalises the concepts of personalised co-created service performance and co-created value for the context of the personalised tourism website. Second, the study advances service management and proposes the framework that integrates service-centric and customer-centric parameters, thereby, creating a more complex but comprehensive approach to assess the performance of the information service. Third, the study expands understanding of user experience and unveils the insights of tourist interactions with the personalised website. The practical implications of the thesis are related to the possibility to apply the developed model as a framework and tool for the service assessment and for further improvement of personalisation as a strategy and an element of the IS design.