Twenty years ago if I was planning a trip I could just buy tickets to some place, buy a travel guide and maybe get some tips with a friend. Last autumn I travelled to a place, and the whole planning was made on the internet. Before the trip I booked the hotel, restaurants, places to visit, bought plane tickets and paid entry fees, just using a computer. As a consumer and a professional in tourism I believe travelling has never been so easy, you just have to use your imagination and have a fast internet.
I am a person who likes to observe people’s behaviour, maybe, that’s why I chose to talk about an article about the profile of people who uses the internet to plan a trip. When we think on marketing strategy and market tendencies we also think about what the consumers want and their behaviour. How has it changed in the last ten years? In which speed the market is adjusting to those changes? The article I chose analyses the behaviour of tourism consumers on the internet, an area that has grown in the last 15 years and has changed the way people plan their leisure or work trips.
When we are studying something that can be so wide like “customer experience management in tourism” it is productive to focus on specific themes that make us reflect and consequently learn more about what we are studying. I believe studying the consumer’s behaviour it is fundamental to understand how the tourism strategies have developed within the years and also to predict what could happen in a near future.
Many years ago, when planning a trip a person would go to a travel agency, or would choose locations looking into a map, a place they have seen on television or in a magazine, maybe they would consider travelling to a place a friend told them about. In the time this article was written (2010) the act of planning a trip was already very different from what it was in 2000.
I think it was interesting that the authors of the article wrote a definition for the act of travel planning or travel planning process
“the travel planning process, different from a single goal-oriented decision-making model, includes multiple decisions and interactions among decisions (Fesenmaier and Jeng 2000; Stewart and Vogt 1999; Sirakaya and Woodside 2005). Stewart and Vogt (1999) defined travel planning as a process entailing information search behavior, information uses and applications, purchase behaviors, actual trip behavior, as well as the learning process from all these experiences”.
And the advent of the internet came to increase the amount of decisions to be made, opened a new world of possibilities and information that people didn’t had access before. But how this has affected the industry? Is this behaviour still evolving?
According to the authors, their research results shows that the impact of the internet has decreased considering that people went from beginner to experienced users or consumers, in another words using internet to plan a trip became a new behaviour.
I believe it’s interesting to think that this article was written thirteen years ago, and something that also called my attention in the text is that the authors left room for future research about the theme, thou not with the same approach because the internet now is not a new phenomenon. The object for future argument, as they say should be the dimensions of online research and its efficiency.
Wang, Dan; Park, Sangwon; Zach, Florian; and Fesenmaier, Daniel R., ”The Changing Impact of the Internet on Travel PlanningBehavior” (2016). Travel and Tourism Research Association: Advancing Tourism Research Globally. 20. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/ttra/2010/Oral/20
