The effect of espoused national cultural values, the five-factor model of personality, and the context of travel on technology acceptance across two levels of structured tourism websites

According to the World Tourism Organization, there were 935 million international tourists in 2010. International tourists collectively spent ;This dissertation's objective was to examine whether espoused national cultural values, the five-factor model of personality, or the context of travel impact the acceptance and use of tourism websites and to see if these effects varied based on differing levels of information structure on the websites. Espoused national cultural values, the five-factor model personality factors, and travel preferences addressing the context of travel all played small but significant impacts on the use of tourism websites. However, their effects are greater because the cultural, personality, and context of travel variables showed that they also indirectly affected intention to use the tourism websites through perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and subjective norms. Some of these effects varied by differing levels of information structure on city-specific and airline reservation websites examined in this study, while other effects remained constant across both levels of structured information tourism websites.;Uncertainty avoidance was also explored to see if it is a cultural or universal construct. As it had a significant but modest correlation with the universal construct of Rotter's (1966) locus of control, this lends support to the claim that uncertainty avoidance may be a universal construct in the use of tourism websites.;A combined espoused national cultural values and five-factor model of personality theoretical model was created to better predict tourism website use than either model alone.;This study was conducted within the framework of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis, 1989) widely used to predict and explain IT usage. This study replicated the work of Srite and Karahanna (2006) and Devaraj, Easley, and Crant (2008) studying the effects of espoused national cultural values and the five-factor model of personality on IT usage in a different context. This study brought Alvarez and Asugman's (2006) travel preferences addressing the context of travel from the field of tourism to the field of IS using different subjects and incorporated them into the TAM model for the first time.