THE IMPACT OF THE INTERNET IN TRAVEL AND TOURISM: A RESEARCH REVIEW 2001–2010
Craig Standing
Jean-Pierre Tang-Taye
Michel Boyer
Information Search-Related Research
Information search in this context is concerned with the processes and theories related to how tourism consumers plan travel and tourist trips and how they search for information. This review has found information search to be a major area of research within tourism research. How consumers search for information impacts on what and how information should be presented and so is a critical research domain. Given the increasing volume of travel-related information available on the Internet and the increasing competition from travel and tourism providers means that research needs to continually develop also to keep pace with the changes environment. Work in this area breaks down into several areas: Planning and searching processes, different categories of consumers and how they approach searching, the role of social media in Internet searching, and comparisons on Internet searching versus other channels.
Research has found that tourism consumers planning on the Internet break the process down into chapters which represent a facet of the trip planning task. Each chapter can be broken down into individual episodes that relate to an evaluation of alternative solutions to the trip facet (Pan amp; Fesenmaier, 2006). The semantic models that users have about a destination are generally different to how the websites of information providers are designed and the language used by consumers is different to that used by the marketing people creating the content of websites. Consumers also tend to use a hub, a website on the destination with many links and in this respect take a foraging approach.
Another strand of research examines how tourism-related information is structured and represented on the Internet, in particular through search engines. An article by Xiang, Wöber, and Fesenmaier (2008) explains that a small amount of tourism-related content is presented by common search engines and the results are dominated by a few major players in the space. This means that many smaller organizations fail to get their message out there in front of potential consumers and the major players become more dominant. One suggestion to partially address the problems is the continued development of specialized search engines for tourism.
A popular research theme within the information search category is to examine the search approaches of different types of consumers. For example, researchers have studied the approaches of explorers versus planners among Turkish tourists, search behavior in college students, destination naive international vacationers, gender differences in search behavior, and cultural differences in search behavior with a focus on German and Japanese tourists. Each group has its own information needs and search strategies and so there is a requirement for websites to be designed to support the search needs of its target market.
The increasing significance of social media on the Internet is impacting the way people gather information for travel and tourism. This user-generated content opens up a range of research options in the tourism field. Xiang and Gretzel (2010) developed an experiment that found that user-generated content was in fact returned by popular search engines when travelrelated queries were input, thereby confirming that user-generated content is likely to be an important part of the decision-making process. Enoch and Grossman (2010), on the other hand, examined the online blogs written by travelers to India and found that some could be classified as cosmopolitan in nature in that the travelers adapted to their context while others did not really assimilate during their vacation. These different styles have implications for using blogs as a source of information for planning vacations.
Using the Internet to search for information can be compared with other information sources such as traditional brochures. Research has demonstrated that brochures would be more effective for verbalizers whereas the virtual experience mode would be more effective for visualizers (Chiou, Wan, amp; Lee, 2008). When both advertising modes are used it was found that the most recently experienced mode generated greater impact. These findings have implications for how marketers provide information for consumers. Other work has highlighted that the debate over face-face (travel agents) support versus online searching is oversimplified. The concept of disintermediation often ignores that many websites are run by travel agents and many businesses offering services online also offer the same services offline (Grønflaten, 2009).
Overall, the contribution of information search research has been in defining how people search for information on the Internet and how they use that information. More recently, researchers have begun to investigate the role of social media and the significance of usergenerated content within the information search paradigm. This consumer to consumer information can be seen as a more informal part of information search area but one which is destined to grow in significance as a research area as organizations seek to exploit its potential.
Online Purchasing Research
There are stages involved in purchasing tourism-related products and services online. Searching for information is major stage but one that is not always linked to a purchase. Hence, we have separated searching for information and transaction or purchasing-related processes. The steps that reflect the final selection of a product, which may include some negotiation has also been included in the online transaction category. Online purchasing is an important area within tourism becau
剩余内容已隐藏，支付完成后下载完整资料
英语译文共 3 页，剩余内容已隐藏，支付完成后下载完整资料
资料编号：[484279]，资料为PDF文档或Word文档，PDF文档可免费转换为Word
以上是毕业论文外文翻译，课题毕业论文、任务书、文献综述、开题报告、程序设计、图纸设计等资料可联系客服协助查找。
