What makes tourists adopt smart hospitality? An inquiry beyond the technology acceptance model

Smart hospitality has become an attractive project in tourism. Extant research has studied smart technology as a contingency but has neglected to conceptualize smartness and investigate its consequences. This study conceptualizes and operationalizes smart hospitality and explores the relationships among smartness, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, overall image of a hotel and tourists' behavioral intention to stay in a smart hotel. The proposed model incorporated technology acceptance model (TAM) and image theory. With a sample of 348 respondents in Macau, this study tested the model using partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM), which indicates that the proposed model fits the data. In spite of a high inter-construct correlation, the results showed that smartness does not have a direct effect on behavioral intention. According to mediation analysis, indirect effects made up of significant direct effects and assigned them to TAM, image theory, and a combination of both. This paper contributes to hospitality management theory by providing additional insight into smart hospitality, it demonstrates the applicability of PLS-PM with composite and common factor models in technological change research, and it suggests smartness as a business strategy that can change tourists' choices in practice.