• The Journal of Industrial Distribution & Business
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.15-30
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• 2021

Purpose: Year of 2020, COVID-19 has been changing the people's everyday life to ways never been thought of before all over the world. The IT and electronic industry, the methods of supplying goods and services have been changed from contact to un-tact environments based on un-tact systems very rapidly. COVID-19 has been striking the tourism and the travel industry, especially the airline and hotel industry of which services are provided by human. For the passenger service of airliner, automation has been propelled and un-tact style of service has become mainstreams except cabin service since 2000's. For passenger transportation, due to traffic regulations and exclusions etc., switching to new ways is not easy. However, under the new environment made by COVID-19, kiosk check-in, web check-in and mobile check-in has become more important. In this study, the characteristics of airline customers using mobile goods are investigated to find ways to raise the rate of utilizing mobile check-in and to increase the efficiency of boarding process. Research design, data, and methodology: Considering the COVID-19 environment, survey was done by online research company. The research model is designed to integrate the user characteristics and usage/purchase motive and technology acceptance theory. Especially considering infectious diseases prevention, concern of safety is adopted as one of the usage motive variable. Results: Extraversion or conscientiousness characteristics prefers counter check-in(contact service), while openness characteristics prefers mobile check-in(un-tact service). Concern of safety for infectious disease shows strong non-preference on counter check-in. Conclusions: Regarding service type regardless of type of the industry, automation and un-tact have been mainstreams due to high costs of labor, efficiency and standardization issue, etc., and COVID-19 has given impetus to them. For airliner, un-tact service including boarding process service has been more and more important. To raise the rate of un-tact service use, the characteristics of the user should be analyzed first. The study results indicate that for extraversion or conscientiousness, some kinds of methods to induce them to use un-tact service more are needed.