Dr Athina Ioannou, School of Hospitality and Tourism Management.

Athina is working with Prof Iis Tussyadiah (PI) and Prof Graham Miller in the EPSRC-funded project on Privacy-aware personal data management and Value Enhancement for Leisure Traveller (PriVELT). The project is focusing on privacy concerns and data disclosure in travel, in collaboration with Universities of Kent, Warwick, and Durham. Our work aims to better understand and measure travellers’ privacy concerns while also assess how these concerns could affect travellers’ willingness to share their personal information.  Our results show that travellers with elevated concerns for privacy tend to have lower levels of trust in travel providers. Trust helps reduce perceived risk of data sharing and positively affects travellers’ willingness to share their identifier (passport, credit card, etc.), biometric (face scan, fingerprints, etc.), biographic (name, address, etc.), and behavioural (smartphone search history, travel expenses, etc.) data. Our findings reinforce the notion that increased concerns over privacy can significantly impact information disclosure, thus travel providers relying on consumers’ data will be facing immense difficulties. To mitigate this, we suggest that travel providers should focus on trust- building and risk-mitigating strategies and activities, such as communicating privacy policies in a clear and transparent way and adopting privacy protection mechanisms and relevant regulatory frameworks in collaboration with other business and government entities to reduce privacy concerns.

Dr Athina Ioannou, School of Hospitality and Tourism Management.