Why Tourists With Identical Intentions Walk Away With Wildly Unequal Outcomes

Every year, millions of travellers arrive at destinations where the gateway to the country itself is digital. Visas are issued through online portals, entry is processed at self-service kiosks, hotel registration runs through state systems, and monuments are interpreted through augmented-reality applications. A new conceptual analysis published in Frontiers in Human Dynamics argues that the dominant scientific models used to predict whether tourists accept these smart tourism technologies rest on assumptions that collapse precisely where such systems are expanding fastest. Led by Yulduz Dushanova of Bukhara State University, the research team proposes a framework built around a deceptively simple observation: two visitors can state exactly the same intention to use a technology and yet emerge from the encounter with completely different outcomes.

The core of the argument targets three assumptions embedded in mainstream technology acceptance research, particularly the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology and its consumer extension. The first concerns digital capability. In conventional models, a person’s skills and resources appear as a facilitating condition, one predictor among several that nudges adoption at the margin. The authors argue that in rapidly digitalising destinations, capability should instead be understood as a stratified, layered resource that governs whether an unassisted evaluation can occur at all. A tourist with low competence may still complete a task by leaning on a companion, a receptionist, or a guide, but that assistance substitutes a channel: the judgement formed is partly about the helper rather than the system, and the standard model never sees the difference.

The second assumption concerns trust. Most tourism studies treat trust as a single belief aimed at a single object, usually a platform or a provider. But a visitor crossing a border must judge several distinct things at once: the intermediary booking platform, the payment infrastructure, the local supplier delivering the service, and the state whose agencies run entry, registration, and data protection. The new framework separates these into four referents, each capable of carrying independent beliefs about competence, benevolence, and integrity. Peer trust, the diffuse confidence tourists place in reviews and ratings written by other travellers, is retained as a fourth referent because it is the one to which visitors with low competence and no institutional familiarity most often turn when screening the other three.

Trust does not sit still among these referents. Drawing on trust transfer theory, the authors describe how a judgement borrowed from one actor moves to another when the visitor perceives a salient association between them, such as ownership, endorsement, or institutional affiliation. Someone who completes an electronic visa without difficulty may approach a national tourism application with a favourable prior, but only if the application seems to belong to the same authority. This borrowed trust is efficient, because it saves the visitor from appraising every new system from scratch, and fragile, because it rests on thin evidence. The framework predicts that trust acquired by transfer is less resistant to disconfirmation than trust earned through direct experience, so a single failed payment at a state-operated kiosk could degrade a visitor’s assessment of the destination’s public digital systems as a whole. The mechanism linking the failure back to the source is calibration, the return path by which experienced performance revises not only the belief about the specific technology but also the belief about the referent from which trust was borrowed, powered by expectation disconfirmation and attribution.

The third assumption concerns experience quality, which acceptance research almost always models as a terminal outcome at the end of a causal chain. The authors instead model it as recursive and asymmetric. A trip is not a single transaction: a visitor failed by a ticketing application at nine in the morning carries that information into every later encounter of the day. The evaluation formed at an early touchpoint revises trust in the same technology, in the referent that lent it credibility, and in other technologies perceived as associated, before the next touchpoint arrives. The asymmetry comes from the well-established negativity bias in psychology: successful operation tends to be absorbed into the background and yields only a modest positive increment, while failure is salient, attributed, and produces a larger negative increment. If that holds for smart tourism technologies, linear models understate the cost of unreliability and overstate the return to added functionality, and design attention should shift from feature inventories to failure design.

The framework, called DITAE for Digital Inclusion, Trust, Acceptance and Experience, treats digital inclusion as three tiers with different temporal positions. Tier 1 is functional access: the material and environmental conditions under which an interface can be reached and read at all, including a functioning handset, adequate data at the moment of need, roaming provision, and an interface language the traveller can read. Tier 2 is enacted competence: the operational, informational, and transactional skills required to complete a task, with transactional skills such as authenticated payments being the most demanding because errors are costly and often irreversible. Tier 3 is realised conversion, the actual obtainment of the intended benefit after use, which the authors stress is not the same as marketing conversion; a purchased ticket that proves unusable at the gate is a funnel success but not a conversion in their sense. The first two tiers gate use, the third follows it.

This tier structure has a statistical consequence that gives the analysis its bite. Conventional surveys recruit respondents who have already attempted or completed use, so the people held back at the access or competence gates simply never enter the sample, and converters are mixed with non-converters unless outcomes are recorded. Because the same competence that permits an unassisted attempt also shapes perceived usefulness and effort expectancy, the resulting estimates are plausibly biased with respect to the visiting population. Inclusion, the authors emphasise, is situational rather than purely demographic: a thirty-year-old software engineer whose foreign card is declined, whose roaming data is throttled, and who cannot read the kiosk’s labels is, at that moment, digitally excluded. Vulnerability is produced by the encounter rather than carried into it, and the proper unit of observation becomes the tourist–task pair.

To ground the framework, the authors turn to Uzbekistan, explicitly as an illustration rather than a test. The country’s internet penetration stood near 89 percent at the start of 2025, and it entered the very high group of the United Nations E-Government Development Index in 2024, yet its infrastructure subindex exceeds its human capital subindex by nearly twelve points, a contextual sign that connectivity has outrun the educational base from which digital skills are drawn. Entry and stay run through state platforms: citizens of roughly ninety states enter visa-free while about fifty-six more use the electronic visa, and all foreign citizens staying beyond three working days must register, usually through their accommodation. Meanwhile, 8.2 million foreign citizens entered for tourism in 2024, spanning visitors who share language, script, and payment infrastructure with the destination and visitors who share none, with Latin and Cyrillic scripts coexisting on signage. The tourism product concentrates in four World Heritage cities, where fieldwork on Bukhara has separately documented tensions between digital provision and physical accessibility.

The central implication is stated as a formal proposition: among visitors who state a pre-encounter intention to use a smart tourism technology, intention converges across the inclusion tiers they subsequently occupy, while realised conversion diverges sharply by tier. The gating tiers do not prevent a visitor from forming an intention; they prevent the visitor from realising it. Intention alone is therefore an unsafe indicator of inclusive digital transformation, and studies that measure only intentions will find nothing where the framework predicts a substantial effect. For practice, the authors suggest destinations design for the failure path, stationing staffed non-digital fallbacks at mandatory touchpoints, shift reporting from adoption counts to conversion rates, and treat front-line assistance as tourism infrastructure where the educational base lags telecommunications provision, since the framework expects larger short-run gains from it than from added platform functionality.

The article is careful about its own status. It reports no new empirical data, its Uzbek material is macro-level and contextual, and several propositions, including the fragility of transferred trust, the asymmetric weighting of failure, and the privacy prediction that unfamiliar visitors lean harder on generalised country perceptions when estimating data risk, are labelled as hypotheses awaiting experimental or longitudinal tests. The authors even state the strongest arguments against their own framework, from parsimony to the possibility that existing constructs already absorb the new elements, and specify the four-stage research agenda by which each proposition could be rejected. If the evidence holds, however, the framework’s reach may extend beyond tourism: the three-tier structure separating pre-use gates from post-use conversion speaks to any government reporting digital progress through infrastructure indices while remaining silent about who actually obtains the outcomes those services exist to deliver.

Subject of Research: Digital inclusion, multi-referent trust, and recursive experience quality in tourist acceptance of smart tourism technology in fast-digitalising destinations

Article Title: Digital inclusion, trust, and experience quality: a conceptual framework for smart tourism technology acceptance in fast-digitalising destinations, with illustration from Uzbekistan

Article References: Dushanova, Y., Ibadullaev, E., Isroilov, B., Khamzaeva, D., & Kushmanov, J. (2026). Digital inclusion, trust, and experience quality: a conceptual framework for smart tourism technology acceptance in fast-digitalising destinations, with illustration from Uzbekistan. Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 8, Article 1961668. https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2026.1961668

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fhumd.2026.1961668

Keywords: smart tourism, digital inclusion, technology acceptance, trust transfer, experience quality, digital divide, Uzbekistan, heritage tourism, DITAE framework, realised conversion, digital inequality, e-government