Tourist motivations for choosing platform-mediated free tours: An application of extended planned behaviour theory

Platform-mediated free tours are highly prominent in major European cultural cities. However, despite their significance, they remain underexplored in academic literature, even though they contribute to overtourism in some cases. This research explores the characteristics of this tourism phenomenon by investigating consumers’ motivations and interactions with it. This is accomplished through a quantitative approach using Ajzen’s well-established theory of planned behaviour (TPB), which has demonstrated its efficacy in predicting various intentions and behaviours. A structural equation model (SEM) was constructed to shed light on the determinants of tourists’ choice of platform-mediated free tours. Our extended TPB model includes trust in the platform eWOM, sustainability values and online loyalty constructs. The results provide insight into tourists’ decision-making processes and validate the TPB’s efficacy in explaining a substantial portion of the variance in purchase intentions for online platform-based free tours.