ABSTRACT
In today's dynamic global environment, understanding how travelers acquire information is important for marketing management decisions and designing effective marketing communication campaigns and service delivery (Gursoy and McCleary, 2004a, 2004b). Understanding the information search behavior of key current and prospective markets can help destination managers and marketers develop target-marketing communications more effectively, because information search represents the primary stage in which marketers can provide information and influence travelers’ decisions (Gursoy, 2001; Schmidt and Spreng, 1996). Application of basic market segmentation techniques, using travelers’ information source utilization patterns as either a segmentation base or descriptor, enables focused positioning and media selection. Certainly, understanding external information source utilization can help marketers effectively tailor the promotional mix. Therefore, it is not surprising that consumer's information search has been one of the most examined subjects and one of the most enduring literature streams in consumer research (Schmidt and Spreng, 1996). Marketing and consumer behavior researchers have been examining the consumer's pre-purchase information seeking behavior at least since 1917 (e.g., Copeland, 1917), and even today most consumer information-processing and decision-making models include pre-purchase information search as one of the key components (e.g., Engel et al., 1993; Howard and Sheth, 1969).
