The Routledge Handbook of Tourism Marketing by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1588695
Publisher: Routledge

Figure 21.1 Travellers interacting with the Internet when searching information (Pan and Fesenmaier 2006).

With the amount of travel-related information continuously growing, tools such as search engines have become increasingly important in directing online travel. The impact of the Internet has generated a considerable amount of interest in understanding the use of search engines for travel planning (Xiang et al. 2008; Xiang and Gretzel 2010; Fesenmaier et al. 2011). For example, Xiang et al. (2008) focus attention on understanding the representation of the tourism domain on the Internet. Analyses of search results from a major search engine were conducted in order to assess:

1 the visibility of destination-related information;

2 the visibility of various industry sectors within destinations; and

3 the power structure of websites that represent a specific destination.

The results show that although there is a huge amount of information indexed, travellers can access only a tiny fraction of the domain; also, there are a relatively small number of websites dominating the search results.

Travel information search is increasingly being captured in travellers’ ‘footprints’ online. Recently, Xiang and Pan (2011) studied patterns in travel queries using transaction log files from a number of search engines and show important patterns in the way travel queries are constructed as well as the commonalities and differences in travel queries about different cities in the United States. The ratio of travel queries among all queries about a specific city seems to associate with the ‘touristic’ level of that city. Also, keywords in travellers’ queries reflect their knowledge about the city and its competitors. Fesenmaier et al. (2011) suggest that the use of a search engine by travellers can be described in three stages, where the first stage, namely Pre-Search Conditions, reflects travellers’ use of (or preference for) various types of information as well as the perceived usefulness of the various travel tools (i.e. types of websites) available on the Internet. The second stage, namely Search Process, describes the basic strategies travellers use to navigate through the Internet to find relevant information in order to make various travel decisions. These strategies act as ‘frames’ within which the information accessed through use of search engines is evaluated (Dholakia and Bagozzi 2001; Fesenmaier and Jeng 2000). The third stage, i.e. Post-Search Evaluation, focuses on the overall evaluation of search engines. Importantly, this stage of use not only results in overall evaluation (i.e. satisfied vs. not satisfied), but also attitude formation toward search engine use for travel planning (Pan and Fesenmaier 2006). It is argued that an in-depth understanding of these relationships is essential as destination marketers seek to optimize the conversion rate between seeing the search result and actually choosing to visit the destination website.

Another important concept is information overload. As information technology further evolves, a huge amount of information has been made available on the Internet. Besides, each individual has different information processing ability and behaves differently in response to the situation they are facing (Bettman 1979; Eppler and Mengis 2004). These may affect the information seekers’ perception of the quantity and the complexity of information (Henry 1980).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.