Gamification in OTA platforms: A mixed-methods research involving online shopping carnival

Abstract

Gamification implemented by online travel agencies (OTA) has been considered as a promising means for enhancing tourists' online shopping experience. However, there is limited understanding of the key gamification affordances valued by tourists and their underlying motivations for participating in gamified OTA platforms. Adopting a sequential mixed-methods research design, phase 1 of this research is a qualitative and interpretive study involving in-depth interviews and case analysis of OTA platforms. Based on the findings from phase 1 and relevant literature, this research builds a research model which is empirically validated by analyzing survey data in phase 2. Results reveal that the four key gamification affordances contribute to tourists’ diverse value perceptions on the OTA platform, which impact their purchase intention during the online shopping carnival. This study sheds light upon the emerging phenomenon of gamified technology use in the tourism context and provides valuable implications for designing appealing gamified OTA platforms.

Introduction

Online travel shopping has become the second most important category of e-commerce nowadays (Nielsen, 2018). In recent years, the online shopping carnival, which is featured with playful spirit and festival atmosphere, is becoming s key strategy to engage customers and boost sales for e-commerce platforms including online travel agencies (OTAs). In 2020, the Alibaba Group Holding set a record of US$38.4 billion (RMB 498.2 billion) in Singles' Day (i.e., Double-11) shopping carnival sales, growing by 85.6% YoY (Alibaba, 2020). Moreover, more than 60 thousand retailers in the tourism industry participated in the Singles’ Day shopping carnival on the OTA platform (i.e., Flypig) of Alibaba.

During online shopping carnivals, OTAs rely heavily on innovative online and offline promotion tools to capture the attention of customers and engage them in the carnival atmosphere (Mata & Quesada, 2014). Accordingly, many OTA platforms have introduced gamification features to encourage customers to actively participate and make purchases during online shopping carnivals. Generally, gamification is defined as the application of game designs in nongame activities in order to engage individuals (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011). Gamification designs such as rewards, coupon giving and badges upgrading are usually used to enhance pleasure, fun and engagement (Shao, Zhang, Zhang, & Pan, 2019). Applied in the context of online shopping carnival, gamification is considered as a useful tool to stimulate customers’ hedonic experiences and purchase intention (Xu, Chong, Krilaviþius, & Man, 2015).

The phenomenon of gamification has been the focus of many past research in different fields such as health care (Boyle, Earle, LaBrie, & Smith, 2017), marketing (Haziri, Shabani, & Chovancova, 2019), organizational behavior (Suh, Cheung, Ahuja, & Wagner, 2017) and education (Richter, Raban, & Rafaeli, 2015). In the tourism literature, while a few studies have focused on the gamification in the offline tourism contexts (e.g., Liu, Wang, Huang, & Tang, 2019) or gamification design for destination marketing (e.g., Xu, Buhalis, & Weber, 2017), little attention has been paid to the practice of gamification employed as a promotional tool in OTA platforms. Research suggested that applying gamification in the marketing campaign usually includes four stages: attract, engage, retain, and monetize (Wen, Chang, Lin, Liang, & Yang, 2014), and the ultimate goal is to enhance participants' purchase intention and to make profits. While previous studies generally focus on the stages of attract and engage by investigating how gamification impacts customer engagement (e.g.,Harwood & Garry, 2015), our knowledge of how and why gamification drives customer purchase intention remains limited, especially in the OTA context. Moreover, specific shopping contexts (e.g., online shopping carnival) have been largely overlooked in gamification studies conducted in the online shopping context (e.g., de C.A. Ziesemer, Müller, & Silveira, 2014; Karać & Stabauer, 2017; Zhang, Shao, Li, & Feng, 2020). Investigating gamification practice in the context of tourism online shopping carnival is of great significance because the online shopping carnival is featured with participation, interaction, and playful manipulation of the everyday world (Xu, Buhalis, & Weber, 2017), which is in line with the objection of tourism activities and gamification design. (e.g., Harwood & Garry, 2015; Wen et al., 2014). Given that recent research has pointed out that gamification could enhance both extrinsic motivation (e.g., utilitarian needs) and intrinsic motivations (e.g., psychological needs) (Liu et al., 2019), the impact of gamification on customers’ purchase intention in OTA platforms may be generated through various value perceptions, which deserves further investigation.

Against the above research backdrop, the objective of this research is to understand how the practice of gamification in OTA platforms impacts customers' value perceptions and their purchase intention during online shopping carnivals. This study intends to adopt the affordance theory and the theory of consumption values to guide our investigation. On the one hand, affordance is considered as a useful concept to bridge the properties of a designed artifact with its subsequent uses (Withagen, de Poel, Araújo, & Pepping, 2012). Applying the affordance theory allows us to examine the technological capabilities of gamification in OTA platforms as part of the relationship between a customer and technological artifacts in the specific shopping carnival context (Suh et al., 2017). On the other hand, the theory of consumption values provides a more comprehensive understanding of the underlying mechanisms that drive customers’ purchase intentions by considering both utilitarian and psychological needs.

Adopting a mixed-method empirical design, the present study is expected to provide the following significant contributions. First, this study expands on extant literature by identifying and conceptualizing key gamification affordances in OTA platforms. Second, this research represents one of the first attempts to systematically examine the role of customers' value perceptions in the gamification context. Third, the present research is a response to the call for a deeper understanding of gamification in the tourism context and how different gamification affordances can be employed to measure customers' reactions to multiple game designs (Tomej & Xiang, 2020). For practice, this study provides useful insights on how to design appealing gamified OTA platforms and to maximize customers’ perceived values especially during online shopping carnivals.