What information do tourists search in the E-sources? An Empirical Study

This study was an extract from a major research work on understanding the electronic sources and types of information in tourists choice process and this portion was primarily intended to understand as to what dimensions of information were being searched by tourists in the electronic sources and to rank those. Secondarily, this study intended to understand whether there were any significant differences in the dimensions of information search based of the tourists selected socio demographic characteristics such as gender, age, and occupation. Supporting evidenced were drawn from the literature review. A structured questionnaire was designed containing necessary variables and floated to 226 tourists who use e sources for searching information related to the destinations. Simple percentage analysis, mean calculation, and MANOVA of SPSS were used for analyzing the data. Pareto Chart of MS Excel was used to rank the dimensions of information search based on the tourists responses. As a key finding, despite respondents gender, age and occupation differences, tourists search for nightlife and entertainment features most in the e sources. Information about the accessibility modes to the destination was ranked first based on its mean value. However, tourists tend to perform wider information search in the electronic sources. Suggestions were provided to marketers based on this research outcomes. Limitations and further scope of the research were also pointed out.