Digital inclusion, trust, and experience quality: a conceptual framework for smart tourism technology acceptance in fast-digitalising destinations, with illustration from Uzbekistan

When a state digitalises the gateway to its territory faster than its population and its visitors acquire the competence to pass through it, digital inequality becomes a cross-border condition. Tourism is where that encounter happens at scale, yet research on tourists' acceptance of smart tourism technologies carries three assumptions that hold only under mature and shared digital infrastructure: digital capability is a facilitating condition rather than a stratified resource governing whether an unassisted evaluation can occur; trust is one belief aimed at one object, although a visitor abroad must judge a platform, a payment rail, a provider, and a state at once; and experience quality is a terminal outcome, which conceals its role as a source of revision for later judgements inside the same trip. This conceptual analysis develops an alternative account grounded in digital inequality research, trust transfer theory, expectation disconfirmation, and negativity asymmetry. It reconstructs digital inclusion as two pre-use gating tiers (functional access, enacted competence) and one post-use outcome tier (realised conversion); separates trust into four referents joined by association-conditioned transfer and by calibration; and models experience quality as recursive and asymmetrically sensitive to breakdown. The elements are combined in the Digital Inclusion, Trust, Acceptance and Experience (DITAE) framework, stated as eight propositions and three bridging mechanisms with theoretical anchors, an illustrative measurement specification, and a four-stage research agenda organised by estimand. The counter-case for existing models is examined rather than assumed away. Uzbekistan, where high aggregate connectivity coexists with uneven competence and where entry and registration run through state platforms, illustrates the configuration; the illustration is contextual and does not test the framework. The central implication is that identical pre-encounter intentions can conceal sharply unequal realised outcomes, so intention alone is an unsafe indicator of inclusive digital transformation. No new empirical data are reported.

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