The Interrelationship of Personal Variables, Website Characteristics and Trust in Online Travel Portals

Lack of trust in online transactions has been cited, by scholars in the past, as the main reason for the dislike of online shopping. The objective of this paper is to develop a framework for studying the influence of website characteristics on Trust in online travel portals and empirically validate it. In the first phase, a causal model is developed in which the relative importance attached to the different website characteristics, to generate trust in online travel portals, are identified. In the next phase, a set of models has been proposed, that focus on the customers' personal variables, i.e., demographic and psychographic-that moderate the relationship between these antecedents of trust, and trust. Our empirical model offers insights into the relative importance of the website characteristics contributing to trust in travel portals across customers of varying psychographic and demographic values in India.