The Trend of Online Travel Behaviours: Cohort Analysis of 2000 and 2002

Abstract

The Internet has caused a dramatic change in consumers’ travel behaviours. Increased awareness of online travel options, improved user-friendly interfaces and the expansion of easy access to travel information have played a part in attracting online consumers. According to the three year Pew Internet project research from 2000 to 2003, they claimed that the constant increase in the Internet usage over the years did not really translate into the increase in online travel users. Despite the rapid interests of online travel, the research on the online users’ usage pattern of travel search and purchase behaviour has received little attention. Therefore this paper is to add more to the existing literature regarding online travel behaviour through these research questions: How did the travel purchase behaviour change on the Internet?; How did the online search behaviour of travel information change?; and How did the total number of travel reservations made change from? These research questions were answered using the Glenn’s cohort analysis (1974) which examines birth cohort differences of the online travel behaviours through inter (between birth cohorts within same year) and intra (same birth cohorts between years) effects. For the analysis, the longitudinal data of 2000 and 2002 was adopted from the General Social Surveys, funded by National Science Foundation which is available through the ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) Website.