Travel Reference
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appropriate representation of a decision process that refl ects the differences between planned and
actual behaviour.
The information search process has also been evaluated within a source-based perspective
which argues that travellers use two different information sources to acquire knowledge for
decision making, i.e. internal and external. By defi nition, internal information search involves
one's memory and occurs prior to external search. External information search refers to
everything but memory when searching for information. Internal information is an individual's
personal experiences, past information search results and low-involvement learning. It can be
actively or passively acquired. External information is always actively acquired through personal
sources, marketer sources, neutral sources and experiential sources (Crotts 1999). The research
focusing on the nature of external information sources has been extended in order to understand
the level of importance of various information sources (Leiper 1990; Bieger and Laesser 2004)
within the overall decision making process. Importantly, this research shows that travel-related
decisions are infl uenced most by prior experience (internal search) and personal friends.
However, recent studies by the United States Travel Association (USTA 2011) and others show
that the huge majority of US travellers actively use the Internet for vacation planning, where
search engines are the ''fi rst step'' in the travel planning process.
Online travel information search processes
Information and communication technology (ICT) has fundamentally changed the way tourism-
related information is distributed and the way people search for travel products (Gretzel,
Fesenmaier and O'Leary 2006; Werthner and Klein 1999; Xiang, Wöber and Fesenmaier 2008).
Pan and Fesenmaier (2006) conceptualized travel information search on the Internet as the
interaction between information searchers and the information space (the part of the Internet
related to tourism and travel destinations) in the context of trip planning. As shown by
Figure 21.1
the travel information space contains different types of information provided by
various parties in the tourism industry who are marketing their tourism products and
communicate with travellers. Three components constitute the interaction: a travel information
searcher, the interface and the travel information space (
Figure 21.1
).
Travellers' situational
factors, knowledge and skills regarding travelling and the travel information space, contribute to
effective travel information search; the travel information space refers to all the travel related web
pages on the Internet which potential travellers can access; the interface consists of search
engines, the information structure of websites, and various metatags and link structures which
are used to facilitate the information search. This framework raises a number of interesting
questions regarding the growing impact of the Internet on travel information search including:
How do we understand today's travellers who are using the Internet as opposed to those using
conventional media? And how do we understand the various interfaces that represent the
increasingly complex travel information spaces?
Following this framework, Pan and Fesenmaier (2006) devised an experiment to describe the
information search process of travel planning in a trip planning exercise in which 15 subjects
were asked to plan a weekend trip to destination. This study confi rmed that the travel information
search follows a hierarchical structure, in which the process can be divided into different
''chapters''. One chapter denotes one aspect of travel planning, for example, selecting a hotel, an
attraction, or a transportation method. Furthermore, one chapter can be divided into different
episodes. For example, to make an accommodation choice, the planner may consider several
alternatives by visiting different hotel websites. Each alternative considered is one episode
of the accommodation chapter. Their mental foci at each chapter and episode are different.
