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Michigan Travelers: Using the Internet to Plan Trips
By Chang Huh, Research Analyst at the MSU Tourism Resource Center
 The role of the Internet is becoming increasingly important in many aspects of our lives, including travel. Travel is an information-based activity, and many travelers now use the Internet to gather travel information to plan trips and to purchase travel products and services.
For potential travelers, trip planning is one of the most importantstages in the overall travel experience, which consists of planning the trip, en-route activities, and memories or recall of those experiences. Currently, travelers’ information seeking and buying behaviors on the Internet occur primarily during the trip planning stage.
The Michigan Travel Market Survey, conducted by the MSU Tourism Resource Center, has surveyed more than 400 randomly selected households in Michigan’s prime travel market (comprised of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Ontario) by telephone each month since early 1996. Recent results of this study give us some clues about Michigan travelers’ trip-related information seeking and buying behaviors. (See Figures 1 and 2 below.)
- Nearly one out of three survey respondents who accessed the Internet were searching for maps or directions.
- Transportation schedules and pricing information were even more frequently the target of Internet searches, with 40 percent of respondents searching for such information.
- The majority of trip planners purchased online airline tickets (80%) and made accommodation reservations (18%) on the Web.
- Overall, 74 percent of the respondents utilized the Internet as a trip-planning tool to gather travel-related information, while only 30 percent actually used it to make a travel-related purchase of what they found.
The Internet has rapidly become a dominant source of travel-related information for travelers, but this research indicates that those travelers are far less likely to purchase travel products and services via the Internet than they are to simply search for information. This discrepancy may be due to the content of web sites (e.g., lack of products offered for sale) and/or simply due to consumers’ lack of familiarity or discomfort with purchasing via the World Wide Web.
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