| As both the rapid progress of Information Technology (IT) and the trend of an aging population are greatly interrelated with the development of tourism, it is important to investigate how older travellers make use of IT for their vacations. The purpose of the paper is to explore the connections among age, IT adoption traits and traveller information needs and how they may relate to travellers IT usage, including IT selection, frequency/level and information searching strategies. Correspondently, a conceptual framework was drafted based on the literature review. This study employed a paper and web based survey with a nonprobability sample of Canadian leisure travellers to test and revise the proposed framework.;The results (N=222) indicated that an aspect of "digital divide" still exists for older people when it comes to more technologically advanced IT equipment/services such as personal digital assistant and wireless devices. Also, for researchers and practitioners in both tourism and IT industries, computer anxiety and personal innovativeness in IT were shown to be useful indicators to predict people's frequency of IT use; while age computer self-efficacy and personal innovativeness in IT are important factors to predict people's level of IT use. Finally, age was not related to travellers' online information searching strategies in this study, while higher computer self-efficacy and higher computer anxiety are related to more analytical and more browsing information searching strategies respectively. The findings of this study have practical and theoretical implications for tourism; however, limitations such as limited generalizability exist due to the nonprobability sample. Future research could explore cohort differences in IT usage and online information search and focus on the growing segment of wireless travellers. |
