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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2973-2681
AccessType
Campus-Only Access for Five (5) Years
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Hospitality & Tourism Management
Year Degree Awarded
2023
Month Degree Awarded
May
First Advisor
Irem Önder
Second Advisor
Muzzo (Muzaffer) Uysal
Subject Categories
Hospitality Administration and Management | Management Information Systems
Abstract
The travel and tourism industry has been drastically transformed by Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), impacting both the supply and demand sides. However, despite the vast literature on the topic, the link between technology and tourism has not been thoroughly examined. These three essays aim to fill this gap by empirically investigating the linkages among ICT, Quality of Life (QoL), and Destination Performance (DP) with rigorous methods, and providing innovative theoretical contributions and practical implications. Essay 1 focuses on how destination residents perceive the impact of technology in their communities by developing and validating the technology impact scale. Drawing on Service-Dominant Logic and bottom-up spillover theory, the technology impact scale is conceptualized as a formative multidimensional construct with 19 items across four dimensions: smart economy, smart travel/tourism, smart environment, and smart governance. The essay provides empirical evidence and novel explanations about how ICT can influence residents' subjective QoL. Essay 2 examines the synergy between ICT indicators and destination performance (DP) across 84 destination countries from 2000 to 2019 using canonical correlation analysis. This essay contributes to the current tourism literature by illustrating a strong interaction between ICT and DP, indicating the growing importance of ICT in tourism over the past two decades and calling for developing economies to capitalize on ICT-related resources to enhance tourism performance. Essay 3 investigates whether ICT variables can be drivers of tourism efficiency for a global panel of 52 countries over the period 2010 to 2019. The study calculates tourism efficiency scores using bootstrap bias-corrected data envelopment analysis (DEA), operationalizes the ICT variable by incorporating Internet users, mobile cellular subscriptions, and secure Internet servers, and regresses the tourism efficiency scores on the ICT variable using the double-truncated regression approach. The results indicate that the ICT variable can significantly increase tourism efficiency, highlighting the importance of ICT in the international tourism industry. Overall, these three essays provide a comprehensive understanding of the role of ICT in the tourism industry, offering empirical evidence, theoretical insights, and practical implications for policymakers and industry practitioners.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/35073705
Recommended Citation
Wei, Wenqi, "THREE ESSAYS ABOUT INFORMATION COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY ON QUALITY OF LIFE AND DESTINATION PERFORMANCE" (2023). Doctoral Dissertations. 2867.
https://doi.org/10.7275/35073705
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2867