The impact of gamification adoption intention on brand awareness and loyalty in tourism: The mediating effect of customer engagement

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Highlights

  • Gamification is a crucial marketing strategy for engaging customers in the tourism sector.

  • The study aims at investigating antecedents and outcomes of gamification adoption.

  • Gamification is a strong predictor of customer engagement.

  • Gamification adoption has direct and indirect effects on destination brand awareness and brand loyalty in tourism.

Abstract

Gamification has been used by tourism organisations for marketing purposes to reinforce customer engagement and to achieve brand awareness and loyalty. The current study, using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, aims to investigate the antecedents and consequences of gamification's adoption intention by tourist organisations, and to examine the mediation effect of customer engagement. A quantitative method was employed using a survey to collect data from a random sample of relevant managers in travel agencies. Using structural equation modelling for data analysis, the findings revealed that tourism organisations have positive intentions to adopt gamification to increase customer engagement and to achieve tourist destinations' brand awareness and loyalty. Implications, limitations, and future research are also addressed.

Introduction

Gamification entails using games with specific aim in mind, typically engaging users and influencing their behaviour (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011; Xi & Hamari, 2019). It is identified as a promising tool for tourism marketing through which customers are engaged to promote tourism destinations. While enjoyed, tourists use serious games to find out information about the places of visit and to achieve memorable experience (Buhalis et al., 2019; Bartoli, Elmi, Bartoli, & Smorti, 2018; Bulencer & Egger, 2015; Xu, Buhalis, & Weber, 2017). Furthermore, gamification has crucial potential benefits for destinations' brand awareness and loyalty (Xu et al., 2017). Liu, Wang, Huang, and Tang (2019) and Buhalis et al. (2019) stated that gamification is a useful technology for tourism sector to reinforce tourist relationships’ development, human resources management, and sustainable community support for tourism. Buhalis (2019) has attributed gamification as one of the technologies that will help increase customer satisfaction and engagement in the future.

Rodrigues, Oliveira, and Rodrigues (2019) pointed out that gamified websites attract young generations' attention and raise their aspiration. Additionally, with the spread of mobile technology, businesses are encouraged to embrace gamification to engage customers and increase sales (Eisingerich, Marchand, Fritze, & Dong, 2019). Hence, Zhang, Phang, Wu, and Luo (2017) indicated that global companies incorporate gamification in their marketing activities (i.e. Expedia). Eisingerich et al. (2019) and Buhalis and Sinarta (2019) mentioned that customer's data collected from gamification apps and social media help companies understand their customers' needs, preferences and support building customer value co-creation.

Gamification has been used by destination marketing organisations (DMOs) for marketing purposes. According to Xu et al. (2017), some DMOs in Thailand and Germany use gamification to market their tourist attractions. Some airlines use it to increase passenger's loyalty and some hotels use it to improve customer engagement or to recruit employees. Some museums use it to maximize visitors' experience (Kasurinen & Knutas, 2018).

Although the previous research has studied the motivations of customer engagement in online communities (i.e. Islam & Rahman, 2017; Rather, Hollebeek, & Islam, 2019) and has also reached a conclusion that customer engagement has a strong effect on brand loyalty, Xu et al. (2017) stated that gamification is still in its infancy stages in tourism industry and the empirical research on the influence of gamification on tourism sales and marketing are called for. In addition, Rodrigues et al. (2019) concluded that measuring attitudes and intentions towards gamification's adoption is a recommended direction for future research to help provide research models contributing to gamification domain understanding.

To address the mentioned gaps, the current study contributes to literature of tourism marketing where there is a call for empirical research on the impact of innovative technologies (i.e. gamification) on tourism marketing activities efficiency. Therefore, the present study aims at predicting the antecedents and consequences of gamification's adoption intention by travel agencies. In the current infancy stage of gamification's adoption in tourism, the present study explores the traditional factors affecting new technology adoption intention (i.e. gamification) and its effect on customer engagement and brand awareness and loyalty.

Travel agencies are a significant component of travel and tourism industry and most package tours are sold and executed by them particularly with the significant role of online travel agencies (OTAs) in marketing holiday packages (Abou-Shouk, 2018; Abou-Shouk, Lim, & Megicks, 2016). Thus, the current study provides significant insights to travel marketers and trip planners in travel agencies to understand the factors predicting customer engagement, raising brand awareness and loyalty and progressing marketing efforts.

Section snippets

Gamification and tourism

Xu, Weber, and Buhalis (2014) have introduced some examples of gamification in the tourism industry. Location-based games could enable tourist interactions via augmented reality, storytelling technique used by DMOs to motivate tourists visit destinations, restaurants use games to motivate customers to win rewards of gained food, and airlines use gamification for improving passenger's loyalty programs. Furthermore, Buhalis et al. (2019) highlighted the potential usefulness of gamification in

Research framework

The research model (see Fig. 1) integrates two models. The first looks at the predictors of gamification's adoption intention by travel agencies using the UTAUT developed and validated by Venkatesh et al. (2003), Venkatesh et al. (2008), Venkatesh et al. (2012) and the widely used amongst models measuring technology adoption in tourism sector (Abou-Shouk et al., 2019a, Abou-Shouk et al., 2019b). The second model investigates the consequences (i.e. outcomes) of gamification's adoption (i.e.

Measures

The current paper comprises eight reflective latent variables (Fig. 1) adapted from previous research. Performance expectancy was measured using three indicators adapted from extant studies (i.e. Abou-Shouk et al., 2019a, Abou-Shouk et al., 2019b; Xu et al., 2017). Effort expectancy was assessed through three items (Sánchez-Mena & Martí-Parreño, 2017; Venkatesh et al., 2003; Yang et al., 2017). Three indicators were adopted from prior studies (Venkatesh et al., 2003; Yang et al., 2017) to

Respondents’ profile

Findings show that 36.2% of involved travel agencies work in international market scope, followed by 34.9% working in both national and international markets while 28.8% serves the national market only. 83.3% out of 84.6% of surveyed agencies owing websites have expressed their intention to adopt gamification for marketing purposes in the near future. The mean values of research model's constructs range from 3.74 for brand loyalty to 3.62 for performance expectancy meaning that respondents have

Discussion of findings

Employing the UTAUT, this study tested the antecedents and outcomes of gamification's adoption intention in category ‘A’ travel agencies in Egypt. Overall, according to the findings, all hypotheses were confirmed. The empirical findings indicated that performance expectancy has a positive influence on behavioural intention to adopt gamification's applications in the Egyptian travel agencies. Using gamification apps has substantial effects on firm's performance in terms of improving marketing

Theoretical implications

With regard to theoretical contributions, the present study contributes to the extant knowledge in tourism studies by examining the determinants and outcomes of gamification's adoption intention within the travel and tourism fields. Gamification has been widely examined in different disciplines and contexts; however, little attention has been paid to the factors influencing the adoption's intention of gamification apps and its associated outcomes, particularly in developing nations, involving

Limitations and future research directions

The present research has some limitations to be addressed by scholars in future research. First, the target sample of this paper included category ‘A’ travel agents in Egypt. Therefore, future studies could examine the adoption intention of gamification's applications in other Egyptian tourism organisations (e.g. tourist villages; tourist resorts; hotels; and/or another category of travel agents) to better understand the factors related to gamification's adoption within these enterprises.

Author statement

Mohamed Abou-Shouk: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing - Review & Editing Writing - Original Draft, Project administration. Mohammad Soliman: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing - Review & Editing original Draft.

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