Title
Exploring the group holiday decision-making process with the support of technology
Abstract
Numerous studies have examined the decision-making process and the associated information search behaviour of tourists. However, very few have focused on how tourists make plans for their trips when travelling in groups. This paper adds to the knowledge of the decision-making process of tourist groups with a specific focus on intra-group interaction and the support of technology. This research adopted a mixed-methods approach, combining two studies. Study 1 employed a focus group to gain an understanding of the decision-making process within a tourist group, while Study 2 employed a questionnaire survey to explore how the use of technology in such a process varies among different categories of groups. Study 1 proposed a model for a group holiday decision-making process with four components: information acquisition, intra-group information sharing, knowledge transfer, and decision making. It was adapted from the “Infogineering Model” and the encoding and decoding theory in communication studies. Study 2 identified new influential factors on the use of technology by tourist groups for decision making. Ultimately, this research produced a number of theoretical implications, as well as practical implications in terms of how practitioners can better support Chinese tourists, family travellers, and tourists with little prior travel experience, and how technology can facilitate group holiday decision making.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1016/j.ipm.2018.03.010
Information Processing & Management
Keywords
Field
DocType
Tourist groups,Travel decision-making,Use of technology,Cultural differences,Human factors
Information retrieval,Computer science,Knowledge transfer,Knowledge management,Communication studies,Tourism,TRIPS architecture,Questionnaire,Information sharing,Decision-making,Focus group
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
56
4
0306-4573
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
9
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lanyun Zhang101.69
Xu Sun2578.56
Christian Wagner35618.39
Christian Wagner45618.39