University students’ adoption of mobility as a service with respect to user preferences and group differences

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) integrates various transport modes into a single comprehensive service; thus, decrease in the inconvenience of using multiple mobility services is expected. This research focuses on the students of Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) and aims to complete a background study on MaaS, which offers a vision of how future MaaS studies could be designed and conducted. The research work investigates the influencing factors in BME students’ acceptance of MaaS. The preferences are categorized into two groups based on the travel captivity and the usage of shared mobility services. An online survey was conducted where a total of ca. 700 valid responses were collected. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was performed to examine the causal relationship between the variables. This study identifies effort expectancy as the most influential factor that affects BME students’ behavioral intention to adopt MaaS. On the other hand, there is no significant effect of group differences on the students’ MaaS acceptance, except for individual innovation for travel captivity and tech-savviness regarding the usage of shared mobility. Conducting MaaS studies with samples obtained from the general population is advised thus resolving the generalizability issue of current research.