IngentaConnect How do travelers find their travel and hotel websites?

Authors: Law, Rob¹; Huang, Truman²

Source: Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, Volume 11, Number 3, September 2006 , pp. 239-246(8)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

Abstract:

In recent years, hospitality and tourism researchers have presented their findings of many studies on website performance and evaluations. Although these prior studies have achieved a certain degree of success for assisting industrial practitioners to develop and maintain their websites, it remains largely unknown how consumers find a specific travel or hotel website. This paper reports a study that investigated the perceived importance of different channels for finding travel or hotel websites from an international travelers' perspective. Empirical results from 153 travel or hotel website users indicated that the Google search engine was the only channel that was perceived as important, and 47.4% of the respondents viewed up to three screens in the list of search results when using search engines. The paper should be of interest to industrial practitioners and academic researchers to understand better the behavior of users of travel and hotel websites during their website search procedure.

Keywords: search engines; websites; optimization; travel websites

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1080/10941660600753273

Affiliations: 1: School of Hotel & Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University 2: HRC Worldwide Hotel & Travel Service Ltd, Guangzhou, China

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