Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and Attitude Toward Using Instagram in Small and Medium-Sized Tourist Hotels in Sri Lanka

Small and medium-sized enterprises play an important role in the economic health of Sri Lanka. Concurrently, the contribution of tourism is vital for its socioeconomic and sociocultural development. There appears to be a vast opportunity for improving gross development product growth by strengthening the business performance of small and medium-sized tourist hotels (SMTHs), since rapid growth has been observed in those accommodation establishments during the past few years. Such entities are currently in the process of regaining lost market share due to the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic and other macroeconomic challenges. Conversely, effective communication efforts for key global source markets are vital, and Instagram is considered to be an important social media network to use. It facilitates photo-centric activities to connect with people and share important content online. Less acceptance of social media networks by digital immigrants is considered a negative aspect. The main objective of this research is to assess the relationships of perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEU) with the attitude toward using (AU) Instagram in SMTHs in Sri Lanka. This study is a survey-based, cross-sectional quantitative study, and the SPSS Statistics 20.0 software package was relied upon for data analysis. A total of 59 SMTHs have been selected as the sample, and simple random sampling has been employed for data collection. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was employed as the base model guiding this research. Moderate positive correlations have been recorded, indicating statistically significant linear relationships between PU-AU, PEU-AU and PU-PEU. 33.9% of the variation in AU is explained by the movements in PU and PEU.