Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
travellers and tourism businesses; travel information searchers, as users, are the central actor. Thus,
discovering information needs of travellers and the way they express them in queries, and repre-
senting the tourism products honestly online and building the trust will be the unchanging
communication philosophy for destination marketing organizations and other tourism busi-
nesses (Urban, Sultan and Qualls 2000). This philosophy should be the guiding principle to
survive in the dynamic and evolving search engine world.
A framework for the use of search engines for travel planning
Search engine results provide essential clues about the traveller, the destination website and the
destination itself. Recent research by Fesenmaier, Xiang, Pan and Law (2011) suggests that
the use of a search engine by travellers can be described in three stages, where the fi rst stage,
namely Pre-Search Conditions, refl ect 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 fi nd 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. satisfi ed vs. not
satisfi ed), but also attitude formation toward search engine use for travel planning (Pan and
Fesenmaier 2006). Finally, this third stage prepares one for future use of search engine for trip
planning, and is therefore linked to the fi rst stage in the overall process. 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. The following provides a brief summary of the three stages of search.
Pre-search conditions
Figure 37.2
suggests that two constructs in Stage 1 determine, to a large extent, whether or not
the traveller regularly uses a search engine as part of the online travel planning process. These
constructs are the various types of information used (Fodness and Murray 1998; Vogt and
Fesenmaier 1998; Vogt, Fesenmaier and MacKay 1993) and the perceived usefulness of the
various tools/websites (Jansen and Molina 2006). Information search tasks can be measured by
Figure 37.2
A general framework of the use of a search engine for travel planning.
