Travel Decision Flexibility (original) (raw)
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Exploring the Decision-Making Attributes of Vacation Planning
The decision-making process of individuals travelling to various places for a vacation is a complex area of research that has received little academic attention. Our Business Research paper investigates the decision-making process/attributes of individuals who have travelled to various places and examines the thought process and major variables that count in their decision. The study will be based on Qualitative framework, supported by Indian consumers and research on different papers by experts. The literature review highlights various factors such as the socioeconomic status, lifestyle and travel behavior with modes and structure of travel planning with Internet playing a major role. The studies also reveal the expenditure pattern and gender psychology in different areas while planning a vacation. Others factors which contribute to decision attributes are the various online sites and booking platforms that provide information and guidance on travelling. The research acts as a precursor to a further in-depth behavioral sensitive modeling study.
Revisiting Travel Uncertainty with an Eye on Information Technology
2016
This study is aimed at a more comprehensive understanding of travel information sources in two formats-traditional and web-based -with a consideration of tolerance for travel uncertainty levels. The findings of the study suggest that individuals believe it is important to reduce travel uncertainty and at some point before an actual vacation, a traveler reaches more certainty about travel decisions. However, no significant effect for tolerance for travel uncertainty on a variety of information search behaviors was found. The weak associations of information sources in traditional and web formats indicated that web-based information sources are not replacing but instead complementing traditional information sources. TV programs and commercials were found to be easily and highly available to travelers and significantly related to tolerance for travel uncertainty. This finding suggests that it is important to consider broadcast advertising which focuses on two factors : (1) "hedonic information need" which captures consumers' attention and stimulates interests, and (2) "functional need" which helps consumers narrow their alternatives and as establish "brand loyalty" based on the images on TV. Additionally, the Internet was observed to be a significant communication channel between travelers and travel businesses or destination organizations. It is therefore important to focus on content that solves travel uncertainty and presents detailed information regarding accommodations, activities, transportations, weather, and culture.
A Study of Traveller Decision-Making Determinants: Prioritizing Destination or Travel Mode?
Tourism Economics, 2015
This paper focuses on how travellers prioritize their choices in making a final decision on their holiday destination and travel conditions, especially on how they consider the ‘all-inclusive’ travel mode. The authors use 1,065 observations from a visitor exit survey (in two waves: 2006 and 2012) to examine the determinants of prioritizing destination choice or travel mode in the holiday decision-making process. Estimating a multinomial model, they find that the decision structure of those individuals who prioritize destination is different from that of those who prioritize the travel mode. The paper also contributes to research on the intention to return to a destination related to the intention to repeat the same holiday formula. The authors distinguish between those tourists who prioritize destination choice and those who prioritize the travel mode. Through an estimated sequential model, they present the results of the revisiting patterns for these two groups.
Tourism Management, 1998
This paper introduces a first step towards analyzing tourist travel choice in situations where tourists may: (i) temporally separate their choice of different components of the travel package, e.g. tourists may choose travel destination before accommodation, and (ii) face a structure of constraints that limits their choice options, e.g. tourists may be restricted by school holidays when choosing the period in which to travel. Theoretical insights with regard to tourist travel, destination and activity choices are reviewed as a basis for the proposed conceptual framework. An exploratory empirical study of the proposed framework is given and implications are discussed.
The Changing Impact of the Internet on Travel Planning Behavior
2016
The Internet has grown to be one of the most effective means for trip planning and recent research shows that that the nature and extent of travel planning behavior has evolved over time. This study builds upon this literature by examining the impact of the Internet on fifteen different facets of travel planning using data sets describing online American travel in 2007 and 2009. The results indicate that the use of the Internet has resulted in an increase in the number of places considered visiting, the number of destinations actually visited, the amount of time spent on advance planning, and the number of information sources used for planning while the likelihood of calling to make a reservation or to request travel information decreased. However, the extent of impact appears to have declined significantly from 2007 to 2009. Further, the findings of this study indicate that the impact of the Internet on travel planning behavior are directly associated with the perceived benefits of Internet use. Based upon these findings, it appears that the extent to which traditional Internet-based information channels affect travel planning behavior has stabilized and that emerging Internet based technologies such as Web 2.0 and mobile computing are looming as major forces reshaping traveler planning behavior. This paper argues that future research should focus on better understanding the ways these new systems affect travel planning behavior.
INDEPENDENT TRAVELER DECISION-MAKING
Independent travelers are those vacationers who have booked only a minimum of their transportation and accommodation arrangements prior to departure on the vacation. Independent travel is an important and growing sector of worldwide tourism. Choice of vacation itinerary for the independent vacation represents a complex series of decisions regarding purchase of multiple leisure and tourism services. This chapter builds and tests a model of independent traveler decision-making for choice of vacation itinerary. The research undertaken employs a two-phase, inductive-deductive case study design. In the deductive phase, the researcher interviewed 20 travel parties vacationing in New Zealand for the first time. The researcher interviewed respondents at both the beginning and the end of their New Zealand vacations. The study compares pre-vacation research and plans, and actual vacation behaviors, on a case-by-case basis. The study examines case study narratives and quantitative measures of crucial variables. The study tests two competing models of independent traveler decision-making, using a pattern-matching procedure. This embedded research design results in high multi-source, multi-method validity for the supported model. The model of the Independent Vacation as Evolving Itinerary suggests that much of the vacation itinerary experienced in independent travel is indeed unplanned, and that a desire to experience the unplanned is a key hedonic motive for
Transport Policy, 2005
Preparatory to an empirical analysis, this study conceptually discusses the influences of objective and subjective variables on the consideration of 16 travel-related strategies, reflecting a range of options individuals have to adapt to congestion. The variables considered here were measured by a 1998 survey conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area. The conceptual exploration shows that the consideration of travel-related strategies may be affected by the amounts of travel that individuals actually do, their subjective assessments, desires, affinities, and constraints with respect to travel. Individuals' travel attitudes, personality, lifestyle and prior experience are also likely to affect their current consideration. Socio-economic and demographic characteristics may exhibit distributional effects with respect to the options individuals consider. These potential influences indicate that the individual adaptation process may be influenced by a wide range of qualitative and experiential variables, which are often ignored or omitted by policy makers and planners. A companion paper develops binary logit models of the consideration of each strategy.
USE OF INFORMATION SOURCES IN OUTBOUND TRAVEL PLANNING: CASE OF THE
Proceedings of the 13th international scientific conference "New Challenges in Economic and Business Development – 2020 , 2020
In the Information Age travellers have a wide range of information that can be accessed by a variety of channels. The kind of information search travellers undertake and acquire will have significant consequences for the purchases they will make. There is a need for repeated studies to track possible changes in tourist behaviour for information search patterns as use of information sources and their combination evolve over the time. Understanding tourists' information search peculiarities can be of use for tourism scholars and practitioners in the marketing planning process. Majority of European citizens are travelling mainly within their home country (Eurobarometer, 2014) still small countries of Central Europe are among the most active international travellers (Eurostat, 2018). The aim of the research is to study the usage of sources of information and their combinations in outbound travel planning for Dutch and Belgian travellers. The research is based on the data of a survey of travelling population carried out in different cities of the Netherlands and Belgium in the summer 2018. 502 valid questionnaires were obtained. MS Excel, SPSS and R network visualization visNetwork software tools were used for analysing the data applying following methods-descriptive statistics, crosstabulation and network analysis method concept as network diagram. The conclusions and recommendations of the study are addressed to marketing organizations of tourism destinations and companies, whose target market is tourists from Belgium and the Netherlands.
Psychological Process of Travel Destination Choice
This paper reviews literature on travel destination choice and organizes these studies systematically. A " cell-system " structure is proposed to describe the psychological process of travel destination choice. In forming decisions on vacations, tourists gather information on potential destinations and evaluate visit intentions among potential destinations (" cell "). The visit intentions are successively compared while information is updated in the process (" system "). The " cell-system " structure provides a clear view of the psychological process of travel destination choice. Empirical studies nested on the structure can provide further insights into why and how tourists choose travel destinations.