An Eyetracking Study on Online Hotel Decision Making: The Effects of Images and umber of Options

Millions of travelers visit various online travel sites looking for inexpensive products and convenient and enjoyable shopping experience. Especially, online hotel booking contributes to a large proportion of hotel sales (Carroll and Siguaw 2003). However, proving a satisfactory online shopping experience within limited space on web pages demands a thorough understanding of travelers’ online decision making process in order for designers to customize and personalize websites (Argo, White, and Dahl 2006). Currently the most dominant travel websites (e.g. Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Orbitz, and Hotels.com) display a list of hotels sorted by recommendation, price, brand or location. Each hotel listing has one or more pictures, a brief introduction, hotel rates, and location information. How the consumers make decisions in this interactive and rich environment is largely unknown. In terms of the process of decision making, psychologists have proposed the additive utility model which asserts that the decision makers use utility function to evaluate different alternatives and pick an option (Tversky 1967). However, when facing many choices, decision makers tend to use frugal and convenient heuristics to save evaluation time and reduce cognitive load (.Gigerenzer and Todd 1999). For example, a study showed that decision makers followed a pairwise comparison when making purchases of automobiles (Russo and Rosen 1975). Using eye tracking methodology, Russo and Leclerc (1994) also demonstrated three stages of a nondurable purchase decision: orientation, evaluation, and verification. In tourism research area, research shows many attributes of a hotel influence travelers’ choices, including rate, service quality, location, and value (Wong and Chi-Yung 2002). Past studies have revealed that the gender of the subjects, the complexity of web pages, and the viewing sequence will determine the cognitive process on web pages (Pan et al. 2004). Furthermore, web site characteristics such as color and image may affect social presence perception or information recall (Cyr et al. 2009; Zhang et al. 2003). The purpose of this study is to use a mixed methodology (eyetracking, verbal protocol, and surveys) to examine the effects of images and the sizes of choice sets on the process of online hotel decision making.

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