Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
21
Searching the travel network
Zheng Xiang, Yeongbae Choe and Daniel R. Fesenmaier
Introduction
Information search is one of the most important features of traveller decision making. This
is because the tourism product is intangible, experiential and complex and therefore, travel
planning often requires a substantial amount of information (Fodness and Murray 1998; Vogt
and Fesenmaier 1998). Travellers often actively seek information to plan a trip, and the information
search process itself can be seen as an essential part of the travel experience. As such, information
available to individual travellers has signifi cant impact on various aspects of traveller decision
making, especially when choosing a particular destination to visit (Fodness and Murray 1998;
Vogt and Fesenmaier 1998; Gursoy and McCleary 2004; Jeng and Fesenmaier 2002; Bieger and
Laesser 2004).
Research on travel information search is especially relevant for tourism marketing (Jang
2005) in that providing the right information at the right place during the right time holds the
key to successfully meeting travellers' needs and wants. Today's information technology enables
marketers to identify and develop personalized information for an extremely complex product
such as a tourist destination (Hoffman and Novak 1996; Fesenmaier, Wöber and Werthner 2006).
It is argued that because of the ubiquity of the Internet both at home and on-the-go, and the
growing adoption of mobile devices such as smartphones with high storage and computing
capabilities, travel information search behaviour is going through fundamental changes.
Within this context, information search for travel products has become more fl uid, fl exible,
fragmented and more likely to be intertwined with other tasks within one's everyday life. As a
consequence certain search strategies such as on-going search and
en route
search are becoming
increasingly prominent.
This chapter introduces and synthesizes the literature related to travel information search
with the goal of providing a new perspective on its role within travel marketing. This chapter is
organized into fi ve sections. Specifi cally, Section 2 summarizes the literature on travel information
search including the more traditional views on the search process, types and source of search,
search strategies. Section 3 discusses the factors that infl uence search behaviour including
travellers' personal characteristics, situational needs and decision frames. Section 4 reviews
recent literature on online travel information search while in Section 5 it is argued that today's
