Information Relevancy for Online Consumer Decision-making Essay

IntroductionThe emergency of Internet has largely changed the travelers end-making process (Buhalis, 2007) and websites obligate become such an integral component of todays businesses that website say-so are of strategical importance to companies at large and hospitality and tourism businesses in circumstantial. It has been a customary practice for hospitality and tourism companies to conduct business minutes to market themselves (Buhalis, 2003 Buhalis & Law, 2008 Wang, 2008) and to enhance communication between suppliers and consumers (Law, Qi, & Buhalis, 2009). As a result, website effectiveness has been a topical area that received sustained scrutiny from tourism and hospitality researchers. However, exclusively a moderate level of success has been achieved (Law, Qi, & Buhalis, 2009). new-fashioned literature in tourism website evaluation have attempted to investigate this area from various angles including website design and functionality, consumer hedonic experiences an d perception of information musical note (Law & Bai, 2006 Law, Qi, & Buhalis, 2009). However, only limited research has been conducted in evaluating online travel agencies (OTAs) websites and travel agencies websites (Kaynama & Black, 2000 Chung & Law, 2003 Roney & Ozturan, 2006). The absolute majority of existing studies in this area are conducted in the context of hotels or tourism destinations. Methodologies employed by these studies are mainly using opinion questionnaires to measure the overall satisfaction level of online travelers, or other alpha approaches such as content analysis or attribute/functionality enumerate against a predefined checklist (Law, Qi, & Buhalis, 2009). It should be noted that most of the existing research tended to only measure the o... .../desire/action to make final booking.2)Questions related to their perceptions how relevant the information presented at each web foliate is in assisting their decision-making. 3)Questions related to their pers onal information. pass judgment ContributionProviding relevant and timely information at each page of a website can be crucial in supporting consumer decision making and therefore website effectiveness. This research would be able to identify specific types of information that online travelers would need at certain stage of their decision-making process. It will potentially provide recommendations to OTAs for online information optimization. Additionally this research could build academic gene linkage between traditional dish up industry where customer-employee interaction mostly occurs and online service industry where customer-computer interaction mostly occurs.