Tourist’s Multichannel Use and Its Antecedents

Abstract

The primary distribution functions for tourism are information services and facilitating booking and payment of tourism products (Buhalis, 2001). Previous research has predominantly focused on particular aspects of the distributions process. The largest body of literature relates to information search processes (see Gursoy and McCleary (2003) and Cai, Feng, and Breiter (2004) for recent reviews).The purchasing function has drawn less research interests (see Woodside and King (2001) for an overview) and the booking function is almost ignored in the literature (see Wolfe, Hsu, and Kang (2004) as an exception). However, tourists are using different channels for each function and therefore display complex shopping behaviours in an ever increasing multichannel environment. Pearce and Schott (2005) showed how tourists navigate a mix of channels during various stages of the purchase process. One of the core challenges in this field is understanding consumer behaviour in a multichannel context (Neslin et al., 2006). It is therefore a need to extend work on tourists’ behaviour beyond information search process to include more detailed analysis of booking and purchase behaviour in order to develop a more complete understanding of the distribution process from the visitors’ perspective.