Abstract
This study presents insights into the influence of the characteristics of tourism itineraries on tourist purchasing behavior. We adopted data between 1 August 2019 and 30 November 2019 from the Qunar, the biggest online tourism platform in China and 4366 samples on travel itineraries were obtained. The ordinary least square regression (OLS) method was used. Controlling for product-related and channel-related factors, we demonstrate that in terms of tourism destination choice, outbound tourism products attract an increased number of tourists; in terms of the types of travel, private travel has replaced group travel to become the majority of the tourism market; in terms of the length of travel, mid-term travel (4–6 days) is the first choice, outnumbering short-term and long-term ones; price promotions such as discount for early decision, multi-person price reduction and membership prices significantly lead to increased sales; online reviews also have great impact on tourist purchasing behavior. In sum, this study uses a unique data set to reveal the influence of online tourism product characteristics on sales and provide potential guidance of the marketing strategy in response to consumer behavior for the online tourism industry.
Highlights
In 2018, China accounted for more than one-fifth of the four billion internet users worldwide and by the end of 2020, about 989 million people had access to internet in China
We aim to reveal the trend of the most popular tourism products and help Qunar Website succeed in its online tourism marketplace product offerings
We began our analysis by developing hierarchical regression models to test the hypothesis concerning the impact of product-related and channel-related factors on tourists’ purchasing behaviors
Summary
In 2018, China accounted for more than one-fifth of the four billion internet users worldwide and by the end of 2020, about 989 million people had access to internet in China. The authors of [4] realized that tourism and information technology would be well integrated and developed because tourism products and services are ideally characterized by online sales. According to statistics of China’s Online Travel Sector Data, the transaction scale of China’s online tourism market reached CNY 602.6 billion in 2016, up by 34% year on year. Apart from the convenience of shopping channels, consumers prefer to shop online for lower perceived price and diversity of product types [8]. They can get insightful information about concerned key product features of consumers by analyzing a large volume of customer online data [9]
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