A case study of university students in the International Journal of Knowledge Management in Tourism and Hospitality has looked at how COVID-19 affected dining out and food home delivery. The team found that in Bangladesh where app-based food delivery services are becoming increasingly popular, price value and convenience were more important to customers choosing online food delivery rather than service quality, delivery experience, and ease of use during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Shahedul Hasan, Md. Imran Hossain Shohag, Imtiaz Uddin Chowdhury, Rubab Miswar, and Md. Ashaduzzaman of the Universities of Dhaka and Chittagong in Bangladesh, suggest that their work offers new insights into how food suppliers might make better use of the apps they offer or are associated with to improve their access to this growing student market.
The team explains that price value is the degree to which consumers perceive the cost of using the system as being reasonable. Service quality is defined as the degree to which the customer is satisfied with using the platform to browse and order and then to receive their food. Delivery service focuses on the latter aspect of service quality and reflects the customer’s experience with the receipt of their food being timely and to the right address. Ease of use refers to how little extra effort the customer must put in to make use of an app, place their order, and receive their food. Finally, convenience is simply defined as the benefit in terms of accessibility to food delivery.
As the team found it was the first, price value, and convenience, that are the main drivers for the university students surveyed in this research, and their inclination to use a food delivery app or not.
They point out that their analysis showed that just over three-quarters of the survey respondents were male, 90% were aged between 21 and 30 years old, and more than three-quarters had used food delivery app services previously.
Hasan, S., Shohag, M.I.H., Chowdhury, I.U., Miswar, R. and Ashaduzzaman, M. (2023) ‘From eating out to online food ordering amid COVID-19: a case of food delivery apps’, Int. J. Knowledge Management in Tourism and Hospitality, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp.50–68.