Transforming Tourist Payment Experience Through Digital Wallet Adoption

Abstract

This paper will explore how many tourists are using digital wallets and how this affects them overall in terms of payment when travelling. The main objective is to determine the distance travelled by tourists with the help of digital wallets and to determine whether the usage affects the convenience and confidence in transactions and general satisfaction. Descriptive research design was used. The 100 to 150 domestic and foreign tourists who visit the major tourist destinations were used as the primary data through a structured questionnaire. Convenience sampling has been used and data analysis has been done using descriptive statistics like percentage, mean and standard deviation and correlation analysis. The results indicate that the use of digital wallets by tourists is large, and most of the respondents used digital wallets on a daily basis or a weekly basis. Mean score analysis shows that digital wallets can contribute greatly to the convenience in payments, ease in tracking transactions bearing relevance to travels, confidence when making payments at tourist destinations and a decreased dependence on cash. The correlation findings, however indicate a highly weak positive association between the frequency of use and the overall experience of payment, meaning that the quality and the effectiveness of the digital wallet services have a greater impact than the frequency of use. The research suggests that destination managers and tourism service providers need to be keen to enhance digital payment infrastructure, merchant acceptance, and trustworthiness of transactions to enhance tourists’ payment experiences as well as facilitate creation of digitally-enabled and tourist-friendly destinations.