Abstract
Travel is gaining popularity among people and around the world. The number of people relying on social networking resources and hospitality/culture exchange travel websites is also increasing. However, there have been voices criticizing hospitality/culture exchange websites for deception, violations of privacy, and lack of dispute resolution process, etc. To address this problem and to glean design insight, our study performed Heuristic Evaluation (with six subject matter experts) on the features and interfaces of CouchSurfing (one of the most popular hospitality exchange websites). The purpose was to understand if current features and interfaces of hospitality travel websites support trust-building among users. Results of the study showed barriers in differing stages of the trust-building process. Results also revealed that the establishment of trust was challenged by the current graphic design, the structure design, as well as the social cue design of CouchSurfing. Design recommendations were made from this study for hospitality/culture exchange travel websites.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aljazzaf, Z.M., Perry, M., Capretz, M.A.: Online trust: Definition and principles. In: 2010 Fifth International Multi-Conference on Computing in the Global Information Technology (ICCGI), pp. 163–168. IEEE, Valencia (2010)
Anderson, J.C., Narus, J.A.: A model of distributor firm and manufacturer firm working partnerships. The Journal of Marketing 42–58 (1990)
Bialski, P., Batorski, D.: Trust Networks: Analyzing the Structure and Function of Trust. In: International Network of Social Network Analysis SUNBELT Conference, Corfu (2007)
Coleman, J.: Characterization of Escherichia coli cells deficient in 1-acyl-sn-glycerol-3-phosphate acyltransferase activity. Journal of Biological Chemistry 265, 17215–17221 (1990)
CouchSurfing, http://www.CouchSurfing.org/about
Doney, P.M., Cannon, J.P.: An examination of the nature of trust in buyer-seller relationships. The Journal of Marketing 35–51 (1997)
Harris, L.C., Goode, M.M.: The four levels of loyalty and the pivotal role of trust: a study of online service dynamics. Journal of Retailing 80, 139–158 (2004)
Hvannberg, E.T., Law, E.L.C., Lérusdóttir, M.K.: Heuristic evaluation: Comparing ways of finding and reporting usability problems. Interacting with Computers 19, 225–240 (2007)
International, E.: World Travel Market Global Trends Report. Travel Report (2013)
Madhok, A.: Opportunism and trust in joint venture relationships: an exploratory study and a model. Scandinavian Journal of Management 11, 57–74 (1995)
Nielsen, J.: Usability engineering. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1994)
Nielsen, J., Molich, R.: Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 249–256. ACM, Seattle (1990)
Overgoor, J., Wulczyn, E., Potts, C.: Trust Propagation with Mixed-Effects Models. In: ICWSM, Dublin (2012)
Rosen, D., Lafontaine, P.R., Hendrickson, B.: CouchSurfing: Belonging and trust in a globally cooperative online social network. New Media & Society 13, 981–998 (2011)
Tan, J.-E.: The leap of faith from online to offline: An exploratory study of couchsurfing.org. In: Acquisti, A., Smith, S.W., Sadeghi, A.-R. (eds.) TRUST 2010. LNCS, vol. 6101, pp. 367–380. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Verbiest, N., Cornelis, C., Victor, P., Herrera, V.E.: Trust and distrust aggregation enhanced with path length incorporation. Fuzzy Sets and Systems 202, 61–74 (2012)
Wang, Y.D., Emurian, H.H.: An overview of online trust: Concepts, elements, and impli-cations. Computers in Human Behavior 21, 105–25 (2005) Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CouchSurfing
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hung, YH., Wu, LF., Chen, CC. (2014). Building Trust in Hospitality and Culture Exchange Travel Sites: Lessons from Heuristic Evaluation of CouchSurfing. In: Rau, P.L.P. (eds) Cross-Cultural Design. CCD 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8528. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07308-8_60
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07308-8_60
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07307-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07308-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)