The purpose of this study was to empirically examine consumer usage intention regarding e-services of foreign airlines operating in Korea and, specifically, to explore differences in user perspectives pertaining to an airline''s website or mobile platform use. The importance of an airline''s e-service, typically represented by web and mobile services, continues to grow as it has become a critical element in the successful business enterprise in the Information Age. In pursuit of these goals, this study extended Davis''s(1986) Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which has been widely used to explain and predict IT acceptance tendencies, and attempted to verify the role of external variables including personal factors, such as self-efficacy, and systematic factors, namely system quality, information quality, and interaction, to understand how e-service usage intention is influenced. This study employed the SPSS and LISREL statistical packages to conduct frequency analysis, reliability analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis, and utilized structural equation modeling or path analysis to identify direct and indirect effects of multiple interacting factors, and to ultimately verify the proposed hypotheses.
The results of this study revealed that the self-efficacy of both web and mobile platform users significantly affect perceived ease of use(PEOU) and perceived usefulness(PU), a finding strongly supported by numerous previous studies. Furthermore, system quality & information quality from both web and mobile users'' perspectives were shown to affect PEOU and PU at similar levels; whereas interaction had no observable influence on PEOU and PU for both platforms, other than a negative impact on PEOU for mobile users. The analysis also discovered that PEOU and PU significantly influenced usage intention, although PU was found to have a greater positive impact on usage intention than PEOU for both web and mobile platforms.
The first practical suggestion based on these results is for foreign airlines'' e-service to provide functions in addition to those related to ticketing, such as hotel reservations, car rental, and travel insurance. Additionally, providing ancillary revenue creatable information could also be useful, to build revenue that is derived from non-ticket sources, for example baggage fees, on-board food services, and frequent flier activities, many of which have already become an important financial component for the airline industry. Secondly, foreign airlines need to build strategies to enhance user self-efficacy that enable potential customers to independently experience successful completion of tasks when using web and mobile services, which will theoretically assist in increasing confidence in the repeated use of e-services. Lastly, foreign airlines need a dramatic increase in interaction with potential customers by improving the timeliness of responses in order to offset the geographic handicap of being far from their home bases with limited resources and only a minimum of provided manpower.