The impact of mobile applications on airline ticket purchasing behavior: a quasi-experiment

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the causal inferences between mobile application adoption and changes in travelers’ purchasing behavior regarding services supported by the travel and tourism industry. Design/methodology/approach: Using a quasi-experiment conducted by an airline, data sets from more than 10,000 travelers were collected, and hypotheses were tested using propensity score matching and difference-in-difference methods. Findings: Mobile application adoption has a significant positive effect on the total purchasing frequency of services and a significant adverse effect on booking tickets in advance and purchasing frequency from self-owned websites. Besides, this finding also suggested that members or travelers who had high average purchases in the past tend to buy more air tickets on average after mobile application adoption, while the number of days to book tickets in advance and purchase auxiliary services declined after mobile application adoption. However, males purchased more auxiliary services via mobile applications. Research limitations/implications: The study is based on the causal effect of mobile application adoption on purchasing behavior. Nevertheless, the theoretical basis remains relatively weak. Furthermore, the underlying mechanisms that cause the changes in purchasing behavior via mobile applications need to be elucidated. Practical implications: This study enriches the hospitality and tourism literature on mobile application adoptions, multichannel purchasing behavior and revenue management. First, a quasi-experimental design is used to verify a causal relationship between mobile applications’ adoption and travelers’ purchasing behavior in the travel and tourism industry. Second, this study adds to examining travelers’ multichannel purchasing behavior in the travel and tourism industry. Third, this work enriches the current literature that explores auxiliary services and revenue management in the travel industry. Originality/value: Mobile application adoption significantly impacted the travel and tourism industry. Besides, To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first empirical studies that examined changes in purchasing behavior due to mobile application adoption from the perspective of service type. The findings provide the first evidence of the impact of mobile application adoption on service purchasing in the travel industry.