Antecedents of tourist trip-planning autonomy: the moderating effects of a global economic crisis

Resumen

A key tourism trend in recent years has been that travellers increasingly use the Internet to find travel information and book and pay for tourism services, with concomitant reductions in their useof traditional, physical intermediaries to plan their trips (European Commission, 2017). We refer to such independent planning behaviour of tourists as autonomy in trip planning.Such autonomy represents a critical phenomenon for the tourism market. First, autonomy in trip planning changes effective marketing strategies for tourism products and destinations when thetarget market is increasingly competent, autonomous consumers. They can easily access information about tourism products or services, including prices. The proliferation of reviews inturn gives firms novel insights into client perceptions, while also providing a channel to respond directly to clients’ comments. Due to these shifts, physical travel agents have largely lost theirtraditional function, and tourism providers and intermediaries confront the clear need to revise their approaches if they hope to provide valued contributions to tourism supply chains.Second, autonomy is a growing behavior. Among European travelers, the Internet is the main channel for holiday planning (European Commission, 2017). Although currently traditionaltourism agents coexist with autonomous tourists, the continued development of the Internet and its widespread use for planning trips suggests that the returns on such efforts will continue todiminish. In turn, understanding the levers of tourists’ trip planning autonomy represents a pressing demand for tourism marketers and managers.