Study On Tourists Information Search Behavior And Influencing Factors

Tourism has become a lifestyle of people, meanwhile, the researches about the tourism has been deepened. Among the tourism researches, the issue on the travelers is one of the most important part. During the period of traveler's decision-making, information-search is the basis of their reducting risk and making decision; it's also a functional tool for the travel managers.This dissertation tries to combine all the previous researches on Library and Information Science, Economics and Consumer's Behavioral Science to make an overall conclusion. And the most important, this dissertation builds a conceptual model demonstrating the tourist's information search behavior, whose function is to study how the tourists choose the appropriate information source, how the factors including demographic variables, perceived benefit, cost of search, perceived risk, product knowledge, search ability, involvement, product type and temperament type influence the tourists information search effort.This study tries to make an empirical test by distributing the questionnaires to the domestic tourists. The model is tested and analyzed by SPSS13.0 software package through descriptive analysis, reliability analysis, factor analysis, one-way ANOVA analysis and Pearson correlation analysis. Then it draws the following conclusions:(1) The major information sources that the tourists use are from the friends or relatives and internet. Besides, there's a little difference between the friends or relatives and the internet according to the gender, age, income, education level, occupation, temperament type, travel frequency and product type.(2) There's an obvious trend that the younger, higher educational level tourists and from the less developed regions make much more efforts than the opposite. Gender, income and occupation have no influence on the tourists information search effort. Besides, based on the travel frequency, there's inconspicuous difference that the tourists who travel more make more efforts on information search. As to the issue whether they have come to Qingdao or not, there's no difference.(3) Perceived benefits, perceived risk and involvement appear to have strongly positive effect on the information search effort as hypothesized. Also as hypothesized, cost of search has significant negative effect on the search effort.(4) Unexpectedly, product knowledge and search ability have significant positive effect on the search effort, it is contrary to our expectation.(5) As hypothesized, product knowledge, involvement and search ability have positive effect on perceived benefit, product knowledge has negative effect on perceived risk.(6) As hypothesized, the tourists of melancholic temperament and choleric temperament make more efforts than the tourists with lymphatic temperament and sanguine temperament.(7) This research divides the product type into type of trip and travel purpose. Based on the type of trip, there's a tendency that the search effort has declined in accordance with team travelers, individual travelers and other travelers. Based on the travel purpose, sightseeing and vacationing tourists search much more information than the business and the other tourists. The efforts of relative-visiting tourists fall between the sightseeing and business group, while the difference is not so significant.