Information search and trip planning behaviour of international and domestic four wheel drive travellers in central Australia

Understanding how tourists acquire knowledge, develop vacation plans and make travel decisions is one of the most critical tasks facing tourism businesses and destination marketing organisations in developing effective communication strategies. Gaining a detailed knowledge about the trip planning behaviour of a specific target market is, however, very complicated and challenging. Numerous studies have focused on the analysis of tourist information search behaviour and have proposed a range of theoretic frameworks and general approaches to understand this complex process. In practical terms, the most important variables to understand the information search behaviour of a particular market appear to be the timing of trip planning and information search, the sources of information used at different stages of the trip, and the contribution of these sources to decision-making. This paper reports on the findings from a recent study which analysed the information search behaviour of international and domestic independent 4WD travellers in central Australia. The research looked for differences between the international and domestic markets in terms of information search and trip planning, and tried to match search behaviours to some commonly used models. The results emphasise the predominant importance of in-trip information search among independent traveller markets. At the same time, it argues that existing theoretic models of tourist information search do not adequately account for spontaneous in-trip decisions.