Factores determinantes del comportamiento del turista de compras. El efecto de las nuevas tecnologías stars

Abstract

Purchases made by tourists have been identified as a strong driver of the revitalisation of local shops/stores. Specifically, the activity termed “tourist shopping”, or its more definitive variant, “shopping tourism”, has been shown to have important benefits both for tourists and for the destinations they visit. However, these activities, where tourism and shopping are combined, are seen to be increasingly influenced by the technological behaviours of their practitioners, a tendency that intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the importance of analysing these behaviours, no previous study has examined tourists’ use of technologies in their purchases in destinations. This doctoral thesis begins to bridge this research gap by analysing models of the acceptance and use of technologies in the context of the shopping done by tourists in their destinations (the tourist shopping journey -TSJ). As a result, four academic articles have been published on two issues related to technology use during the TSJ: information sources and smartphones. The first article, based on the UTAUT2 (extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology) technology acceptance model, identifies the drivers of the use of information sources to make purchases in tourist destinations in the initial stage of the purchasing process. It was found that tourists are more influenced by utilitarian than hedonic motivations when using information sources during their TSJs. The second article, which applied the CAN (Cognitive-Affective-Normative) model, explores the antecedents of the use of information sources in the purchasing process in smart tourism destinations (STD). It was found that cognitive variables are the most important. In addition, this article presented for the first time the concept of TSJ to refer to the purchasing process undertaken by tourists in tourism destinations. The third article models the use of smartphones in the purchase process in tourist destinations through a modification of the CAN model, specifically in its affective dimension; this introduced an important simplification and provided greater understanding without affecting the model’s explanatory and predictive capabilities. Again, the results emphasised the importance of the cognitive dimension, which was shown to exert the greatest influence on the intention to use, and use of, technology, in this case, smartphones, in the TSJ. Finally, the fourth article advances the knowledge of the technological behaviours of tourists during the purchase process through an analysis of the moderating effect of COVID-19 in the acceptance and use of smartphones in the shopping process in tourist destinations. The results of this research showed that the model used, specifically a combination of the UTAUT and the CAN framework, had a greater explanatory capacity for behaviours carried out in the COVID-19 context, that is, that tourists are more likely to use smartphones in their TSJs in this new, pandemic scenario, and that there are differences between the COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 contexts with respect to several of the factors that influence the use of smartphones. The publications that make up this doctoral thesis make theoretical contributions that advance the knowledge of the technological behaviours of tourists in their purchases in destinations. Similarly, practical recommendations are made for tourism destination managers to help them in their evolution towards being smart shopping destinations and to revitalise local shops/stores. In addition, the limitations of the works point the way for the opening of future research lines.