Room with a view: how hedonic and utilitarian choice options of online travel agencies affect consumers’ booking intentions

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate how hedonic and utilitarian choice options of online travel agencies (OTAs) affect consumers’ process enjoyment and booking intentions. Design/methodology/approach: The authors apply a one-factorial experimental design. The stimuli consisted of screenshots of the fictitious OTA “www.my-holiday.com”. Participants were told to imagine they were planning a city trip to San Francisco and that, during an internet search, they came across a new OTA called “www.my-holiday.com”. Findings: The authors find that both booking intentions and process enjoyment are higher for hedonic OTAs, i.e. OTAs which offer more hedonic choice options such as entertainment and spa. The authors conclude that these toolkits strongly relate to pleasurable experiences and positive emotions. Therefore, these options drive positive affective reactions in terms of process enjoyment, which subsequently affect booking intentions. Additionally, the authors find that preference insight positively affects consumers’ booking intention as the number of choices provided by the OTA increases. Originality/value: This paper contributes to tourism research on online travel shopping behavior. The authors apply knowledge from research on online customization tools to an OTA context and show that hedonic and functional choice options of OTAs significantly reflect on consumer behavior.