An exploratory study of the weather and calendar effects on tourism web site usage
| Published date | 23 February 2010 |
| Date | 23 February 2010 |
| Pages | 127-144 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521011024164 |
| Author | Gyoo Gun Lim,Do Hyun Kim,Minnseok Choi,Jin H. Choi,Kun Chang Lee |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
An exploratory study of the
weather and calendar effects on
tourism web site usage
Gyoo Gun Lim
School of Business, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea
Do Hyun Kim
Korean Tourism Organisation, Seoul, Korea
Minnseok Choi
Department of Management Science and Engineering,
Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul, Korea
Jin H. Choi
School of Business, Sejong University, Seoul, Korea, and
Kun Chang Lee
Business School and Department of Interaction Science,
Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the weather and calendar effects on the usage
pattern of a tourism web site.
Design/methodology/approach – This paper analyses data from a yearlong web log involving
21,655,089 visitors to a popular tourism web site. The weather factors include rain, snow, cloud cover,
and the calendar factors include seasons and holidays in order to test the proposed model.
Findings – Using data from the Korea Tourism Organisation and the Korean Meteorological
Administration, the results show that when it was rainy, cloudy, summer or a workday, the number of
visitors to the tourism information web site was higher.
Originality/value – The results provide managers involved in the tourism industry with useful
insights for effective use of web sites by running them more efficiently and setting up appropriate
marketing strategies in terms of the weather and calendar variables.
Keywords Tourism, Worldwideweb, Customer relations
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Tourism is an information-intensive industry that relies on communication with
tourists through various channels to market products, and build customer
relationships (Poon, 1993). The internet has become particularly important as one of
the most effective means for tourists to seek information and purchase tourism-related
products. Since the internet has the potential for high levels of interactivity and can be
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This study was supported by the research fund of Hanyang University (HY-2009-000-0000-0721).
Weather and
calendar effects
127
Refereed article received
21 March 2009
Approved for publication
7 July 2009
Online Information Review
Vol. 34 No. 1, 2010
pp. 127-144
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684521011024164
customised to a great extent, it can provide highly tailored content to users according
to their idiosyncratic preferences (Newhagen and Rafaeli, 1996). However, users are
often overwhelmed by the huge amount of information available online and thu s
cannot always locate what they intended to find.
Tourism information web sites should provide users with powerful navigation and
search capabilities so the desired tourism information or product can be found
conveniently and efficiently. However, most of the information offered by tourism web
sites is not determined by considering tourists’ needs, instead it is based on the
interests of the service providers. Thus tourism information and terms are sometimes
not systematically organised, furthermore they are often out of date. Accordingly web
sites become less useful to visitors over time. Therefore the managers of tourism web
sites need to focus on visitors’ usage patterns or behaviour and understand the visitors’
interests better.
Detecting changes in customer behaviour or interests can be considered at two
different levels: organisational and individual (Song, 2003). At the organisational level
it is critical to understand the changes in behavioural patterns (i.e. buying, visiting or
usage patterns) of visitors over time because information service providers can
promote desirable patterns and reduce undesirable patterns with this information.
More specifically, most information service providers have a strong need to know and
respond to the answers to the following questions: Which factors affect visitor
behaviours and preferences before and after critical weather or climate change? What
are the differences in visitor behaviour before and after a special campaign or
information service? In other words, the required research is change mining (Song et al. ,
2001) that focuses on change detection at the individual and organisational levels.
As a first step we analysed the usage pattern of a popular tourism web site to verify
the weather and calendar effects. We conducted an empirical study of how weather
variables and calendar variables affect the usage pattern of the tourism web site. We
analysed data from a year-long web log involving 21,655,089 visitors to a popular
tourism web site “Visit Korea” (www.visitkorea.or.kr), which is operated by the Korean
Tourism Organisation as the representative web site for public tourism information in
Korea (see Figure 1). Korea is an appropriate country in which to test weather and
calendar effects on web-based searches for tourism information because the country
has four distinct seasons (spring, summer, autumn and winter) and most Koreans use
the internet to find tourism information.
Literature review
Tourism information
Tourism is a very information-intensive industry. Tourism information involves
diverse activities including reservations, travel, experience, price and traffic. Sever al
studies have highlighted the amount of valuable tourism information available on the
internet (Pan and Fesenmaier, 2000; Proll and Retschitzegger, 2000; Wober, 2003).
These components are combined, integrated and packaged in different ways in order to
suit different tourists’ needs. Tourism information thus includes the integration,
activation and coordination of tourism suppliers such as hotels, airlines, rental cars,
travel agents and restaurants. The consumers of tourism information are equally
diverse, with different ages, interests and motives for travel. These characteristics lead
to the increasing complexity and diversity of tourism information services. Indeed,
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