Consumer Information Search Effort And Its Influencing Factors In Tourism

With the rapid development of the social economy and the improvement of the people's standard of living, tourism has become a very important part of people's daily lives and our country's economy. Therefore, more and more researchers and enterprisers focus on tourists purchasing behaviors and consumption traits, whose essential section is pre-purchase information search. Most tourism products are purchased, consumed and evaluated in the form of services. The production, consumption and evaluation of services differ from goods. Therefore, the way travelers search for information and its importance is likely to be different from the way consumers search for information to purchase goods and its importance. This study uses the former literatures for references to demonstrate the relationships between information search effort and its influencing factors. It is expected that the explanation of how these factors affect information search effort, and some academic and practical revelations.This thesis collects many former research fruits of the information search effort, involvement, time availability, prior product knowledge and perceived risk through reviewing the related literatures. Therefore, a conceptual model, including external information search effort as dependent variables, involvement, time availability, prior product knowledge and perceived risk as independent variables, was built up and also empirically tested.The research object of the study is the domestic tourists, and we distribute questionnaires to the college student travelers on campus by convenient sampling. The model is tested and analyzed by SPSS13.0 software package through Cronbach's α reliability analysis, factor analysis, Pearson correlation analysis and regression analysis. The outcome shows: (1) If the tourists have more time for information search, they will do more external information search effort; (2) If the tourists are highly involved in a travel, they will do more external information search effort; (3) If the tourists have more traveling knowledge, they will do less external information search effort; (4) If the...