Exploring Consumers’ Attitudes and Behaviours Toward Online Hotel Room Reservations

American Journal of Economics 2013, 3(5C): 6-11 DOI: 10.5923/c.economics.201301.02

Exploring Consumers’ Attitudes and Behaviours toward Online Hotel Room Reservations

Adeline Kok Li-Ming1,* , Teoh Boon Wai2

1

Centre for Tourism, Hospitality and Culinary M anagement, Sunway University Business School, Sunway University, Petaling Jaya, 46150, M alaysia 2 Darts Inspire, Petaling Jaya, 47400, M alaysia

Abstract Marketers in Malaysia need to have solid understanding on consumers’ online attitude and buying behavior.

This is mainly due to the shift and trend that consumers are moving fast into online purchasing. Malaysia is rank one of the ten countries in the world with the highest number of internet users. The travel market in the Asia Pacific region is fast growing and more consumers are reserving their hotel reservations via online travel agencies. Hence, the main purpose of this conceptual paper is to exp lore the factors that influence consumers’ attitude and purchase behaviour toward online hotel roo m reservations. Four factors which are informat ion, trust, price and convenience have been identified in this study. The focus of this study will be on consumers who reserve their hotel roo ms via online travel agents. The research plans to adopt a survey method using stratified random sampling and the hypotheses will be tested using structural equation modelling.

Keywords Consumers Attitude, Online Buying Behaviour, Online Hotel Roo m Reservations

intermediaries that assist the hotels in selling their roo ms. Among the frequently used OTA are Expedia.co m, Booking.com, Agoda.com and Asiaroo ms.com. Consumers that are searching and making reservations online are on the rise. According to eMarketer[3], it is estimated that in the Unites States, 114 million internet users will exp lore t ravel online and 93.9 million will make reservations online in 2012. Th is is said to catch on in the Asia Pacific region. Pho CusWright report[4] revealed that they...