AI-Powered Hotel Booking Experience: The Mediating Function of E-Commerce Politeness on Travel Ecommerce Platforms
Abstract
Hotel booking is a core product on travel e-commerce platforms with high value and high involvement; consumers’ purchase decisions in this area largely depend on information transparency and perceived fairness of the process. As artificial intelligence is increasingly applied in this process, algorithmic opacity and potential manipulation become prominent in such typical scenarios, easily triggering unique trust crises and ethical issues. This study focuses on the high-involvement, high-perceived-risk hotel booking scenario and introduces e- commerce politeness theory into AI interaction research to examine its role as a key mediating mechanism through which AI empowerment affects user experience. Integrating the perspectives of AI empowerment and e-commerce politeness, and taking Tongcheng Travel as the research subject, the study employs the Analytic Hierarchy Process to model and analyze perceived overall platform experience data from 178 users. In the analysis, the hotel booking scenario—characterized by high involvement—is used as a detailed example to interpret the mechanisms revealed by the data. AHP weight analysis shows that the platform mainly relies on shaping users’ politeness perceptions of perceived value and product and service diversity to drive positive evaluations; e-commerce politeness is the key mediating variable that converts AI technological effectiveness into user trust and satisfaction.
Keywords
E-Commerce Politeness; AI Empowerment; User Experience Quality; Hotel Booking; Travel E-commerce Platforms; Analytic Hierarchy Process
References
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