Behavior intention to adopt IRCTC application for railway ticket reservation service: A case study of Goan consumers (India)

Abstract

Last decade witnessed an increase in usage of internet which led to increase in smartphone usage with various applications developed for making the life of people easy, resulting in dynamic change in the lifestyle of people. One such dynamic change taken place in India is in the area of transport, especially rail travel application started by Indian Railways, namely, Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) portal. Present paper tries to identify the reason why people consider the IRCTC application as the most reliable application. Model was proposed by adopting the factors from Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) along with an addition of perceived trust as an influencing factor. Data from 193 usable questionnaires was collected from Goa and were tested against the research model. Result indicated that habit, hedonic motivation, performance expectancy, and perceived trust were the main predictors of behavior intention to adopt and use IRCTC application. The proposed model was able to explain 65 percent variance on behavior intention. It was also found that income moderates the relationship between facilitating condition and behaviour intention. The study also provides valuable insight for the management to improve the IRCTC application in order to motivate customers to adopt and continuously use the services of this application.