Why Travellers Switch from Traditional Watches to Smartwatches: The Roles of Travel Convenience, Multifunctionality, Health Orientation, and Digital Attachment

This study develops and tests an integrated model explaining why travellers substitute conventional watches with smartwatches, incorporating functional, emotional, and health-related factors: travel convenience, perceived multifunctionality, digital travel attachment, health monitoring orientation, and smartwatch satisfaction. The majority of studies have explored technology adoption and continuation or health-oriented usage of a product but not its substitution by travellers, making it necessary to identify the main determinants of this behaviour. Because the phenomenon of interest is substitution rather than first-time adoption, the target population is travellers who already use a smartwatch; switching intention is accordingly operationalised as the intention to complete the substitution—that is, to make the smartwatch the primary timepiece during travel and to relinquish the conventional watch—rather than as an initial adoption decision. Data were gathered using an online questionnaire of 406 respondents in Indonesia who were users of smartwatches and travelled outside of their city in the last six months. The measurement model was first purified through exploratory factor analysis and then validated through confirmatory factor analysis, with convergent and discriminant validity established before the structural model was estimated. The results obtained suggest that travel convenience is positively associated with perceived multifunctionality, digital travel attachment, and health monitoring orientation. Moreover, perceived multifunctionality, digital travel attachment and health monitoring orientation are positively associated with smartwatch satisfaction, which in turn shows the strongest association with travellers’ intention to switch to smartwatches. Smartwatch satisfaction shows the strongest association with switching intention (β = 0.861, 95% CI [0.744, 0.978]) and the model accounts for 74.2% of its variance, while all ten indirect effects tested are significant, indicating that satisfaction is the channel through which the functional, emotional and health-related evaluations reach the substitution decision. These results mean that travellers are more likely to use smartwatches because of their multifunctionality and the possibility of using them to facilitate mobility, connectivity, health care, and improve the travel experience. With regard to sustainability, the findings are interpreted in relation to SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being), through the proactive use of wearable technology for health monitoring during travel; SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure), through the reconfiguration of travel consumption by digital innovation; and SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), through the device convergence that reduces the number of single-function products travellers carry. These linkages are developed conceptually in Section 5.3 and Section 6.3 and were not measured directly in the present study.