Microsoft Word 2007 ichrie conference Proceedings Final-Final 06-06-07. doc

 
INTRODUCTION 
Online travel shopping is a rapidly growing business sector on the Internet. The study of Ahuja, Gupta, and 
Raman (2003) indicated that among the frequency of purchase of eight product categories, the most popular 
category was the purchase of travel products; more than 53% students and 61% non-students purchased travel 
products from an online website in the past year. The Internet has clearly changed the way people do shopping in 
their daily life, which empowers the consumer with real-time, comprehensive information. Now consumers are 
spending more online as they continue to take advantage of tremendous convenience and time-saving benefits of the 
Internet. A recent Travel Industry Association of America (2004) study found that over half of Americans age 18 or 
older (56%) claimed they currently used the Internet, either at home, work/school, or both. The huge amount of free, 
real-time, information empowers customers to easily compare prices and product features across travel suppliers. 
Under these consumer-driven circumstances, new business opportunities have appeared in the Internet marketplace. 
Even though we are seeing more consumers shop and spend more of their travel budgets online, the total consumer 
expenditures for travel has not increased dramatically. In fact, researchers have found that the use of the Internet for 
marketing purposes has not substantially increased overall consumer spending, but rather prompted a re-distribution 
of travelers spending (Peterson, Balasubramanian, Bronnenberg, 1997). Given the redistribution of revenues among
channels or among members of a channel, competition in the travel industry has become fiercer than it was before 
(Hagel & Eisenmann, 1994). To remain competitive and defend market share, online travel agencies have made 
concerted efforts to improve the technical and service aspects of their website and enhance the value of the shopping 
experience.
A significant portion of the extant research on online shopping behavior has focused on an examination of a 
websites attributes (Law and Wong, 2003) or features of an online travel agency (Kim, Kim, Han, 2007; Law, 
Leung, & Wong, 2004; Heung, 2003; Tsai, Huang, Lin, 2005; Law & Hsu, 2006; Ho, 2007), rather than on the 
travel products being offered. For instance, the perceived quality and value of an online travel site is critical in 
attracting customers into the website and attributes such as useful content, access, navigation, design, response, 
security, and ease of use are important enough to make customers revisit. Thus, improving the quality of a website 
alone may not be enough to keep customers loyal to the online travel agencies, whereas providing an online travel 
product in which contains reasonable value along with product-related features such as an attractive price, 
convenience,, and variety could increase customer satisfaction and loyalty (Beldona, Morrison, O’Leary, 2005; 
Ahuja et al., 2003; Card, Chen, Cole, 2003). In order to develop successful online strategies, travel suppliers should 
first understand the drivers of online consumer behavior such as defining the particular attributes that can directly or 
indirectly affect customer purchase and post-purchase behaviors. In fact, even though, researchers have examined 

---