Determinants of user's intentions to book hotels: a comparison of websites and mobile apps

Purpose: This empirical study uses the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework to examine the interrelationships amongst hotel websites and app quality, flow, telepresence, user engagement and booking intentions. Design/methodology/approach: Data from two different datasets, including users of hotel websites (N sample 1 = 257) and hotel mobile apps (N sample 2 = 292), were collected. Partial least squares (PLS-SEM) was used to test the research model. Findings: Findings indicate that the quality of the hotel websites and mobile apps positively influences telepresence, flow and engagement. Telepresence and flow positively affect the users booking intentions for both the samples. However, for hotel website users, engagement has a no-significant effect on booking intentions. Finally, telepresence has a non-significant effect on flow, and flow has a non-significant effect on engagement for both the users of hotel websites and mobile apps. Originality/value: This study uses two datasets to understand how hotel booking channel (hotel website and mobile app) quality leads to booking intentions by tapping into telepresence, flow and engagement.