Cultural roadblocks? Acceptance of blockchain-based hotel booking among individualistic and collectivistic travelers

Purpose Blockchain technology is predicted to revolutionize the tourism and hospitality industry through peer-to-peer hotel bookings with little or no involvement of intermediaries. Outstanding features of this technology are its distributed form of storing data, its collaborative way of identifying the “true state” of a system and the immutability of data. These features may lead to a perceived loss of controllability among travelers. Based on the Agentic Theory of Human Behavior, the purpose of this study is to propose that this assumed loss of control matters more to travelers with an individualistic rather than a collectivistic predisposition. Design/methodology/approach In two studies (n = 475 and n = 196) using verbal scenarios, this study manipulates the perceived controllability of a blockchain-enabled hotel booking app by varying the number of additional services linked to the app. This study tests for the interaction of controllability with individual-level measures of individualistic versus collectivistic (I-C) predisposition. Findings Collectivistic travelers are more willing than individualistic travelers to use blockchain technology for their hotel bookings. This effect can be mitigated by offering additional services that give individualistic travelers an enhanced sense of “being in control”. Practical implications Blockchain-enabled applications facilitating direct hotel bookings without any additional intermediary services are more readily accepted by travelers with a collectivistic mindset. Blockchain applications addressing individualistic travelers require added services that establish a sense of controllability. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to investigate the interaction of I-C predisposition with perceived controllability in tourism and hospitality. Furthermore, it is the first in the technology-acceptance literature to test this interaction using individual-level measures of I-C predisposition and an experimental manipulation of perceived controllability.