Exploring The Impact Of External Cues On Consumers' Intentions To Purchase Travel Online

China's online travel market has a rapid development in recent years.Travel products have the features of invisibility,characteristics of production and consumption at the same time,making the tourism industry and information communication technology could combine perfectly.Tourism industry is considered suitable for the developing electronic commerce.In the online travel context,consumers can not have direct contact with travel product.So most of the time they have to judge the travel products' quality based on the external cues that the travel website provided,and then make purchase decisions.Therefore,it is meaningful to study how consumers to analysis multiple external cues in the online travel context.This research studied how multi-cues impact the consumers intensions to purchase travel online.First of all,this paper introduces research questions,research methods,research thought,and describes the research process in detail.Secondly,this paper reviews the related research at home and abroad,and introduces the theoretical foundation cue theory and gives illustration on relevant variables(travel website' brand familiarity,presence,price and intensions to purchase travel online).Then put forward the research framework and related assumptions.Thirdly the study implemented 2(travel website' brand familiarity:high vs.low)x 2(presence:high vs.low)x 2(price:high vs.low)experiment design to explore external cues and their interaction effects on online purchase intentions.Based on the real travel website,this study designed 8 websites to test the participants response in the online travel context.At last,data analysis showed:(1)In the online travel context,external cues have significant influence on consumers'intensions to purchase travel online.Travel website' brand familiarity,presence and price,as important external cues,they all have significant influence on consumers' intensions to purchase travel online.(2)In the online travel context,external cues(travel website' brand familiarity,presence and price)have interaction effects.And this study verified the cue-diagnosticity theory and cue-consistency theory.The valence of a high-scope cue(i.e.,travel website' brand familiarity)affects the diagnosticity of low-scope cues(i.e.,presence and price).When the travel website,brand familiarity is high,presence and price have influence on consumers' intensions to purchase travel online.But when the travel website' brand familiarity is low,presence and price will not have influence on consumers' intensions to purchase travel online.Under high travel website' brand familiarity,the interaction effect of presence and price is stronger when they provide consistent(i.e.,high presence-low price)versus inconsistent(i.e.,high presence-high price,high presence-low price)information.Under low travel website'brand familiarity,the interaction effect of presence and price is not significantly different among consistent or inconsistent cue pairs(regardless of their valence).From the cue theory,this paper explored the influence of external cues on consumers'purchase intention of online travel.This study enriched the field of purchasing travel online and put forward some suggestions of tourism marketing practice.Finally,the limitations of this paper and the future research directions were pointed out.