Holiday Decision Making Investigation

Holiday Decision Making
An investigation on how Students do holiday Information Search

Introduction

The main objective of this chapter is to outline the literature that has already been researched on holiday decision making in order to answer to research question.

‘’An investigation on how Students do holiday Information Search’’

This topic is of interest as the decision making of holidays is an important stage of the decision making process and that is also influenced by many factors.
This chapter outlines the meaning of a holiday and why people go on holidays. Further, the chapter looks at holiday decision making process and different factors that influence holiday decision making. This is than followed by the information search

Making a decision as described by Harris, implies that there are alternative choices to be considered, and in such a case we do not only wish to identify as many of these alternatives as possible but we want to choose the one that best fits with our goals, objectives, desires, values, and so on(Harris, 2012).
The study of decision-making has been central to the consumer behaviour literature since the early 1950s (Marcevova, 2011).
The process of decision making is one of the most complex mechanisms of human thinking as various factors and courses of action are intervened in it, with different results (María et al, 2007). (Brockman & Russell, 2009) also agrees to the above statement as he notes; Making decisions can be complex because of the large amount of factors that influence the decision making process.
Orasanu and Connolly (1993) define this process as a series of cognitive operations that is performed consciously, which include the elements from the environment in a specific time and place. Decision making as defined by Narayan and Corcoran (1997) is the interaction between a problem that needs to be solved and a person who wishes to solve it within a specific

Jenkin (2010), States that this is now changing, as a result of the use of the internet and differences in how people go about with their information search and decision making.

According to Jenkin (2010), social networking sites and travel blogs have taken tourism and travel booking experience to a new level that has never been experienced before e.g. by allowing tourists to communicate not just with the tourism operator but also with other tourists that have experience from the very same operator that they are considering purchasing from (Jenkin, 2010). Ráthonyi notes that tourists in order to decrease the uncertainty derive from the travel decisions collect more and more indispensable information in connection with the travel (Ráthonyi, 2011).
The use of websites has been found to be effective as people has access to then 24 hours daily and world-wide (Lin & Huang, 2006).
Chau (2012) stated that social media offers consumers a platform for seeking advice about their buying decisions from trusted, influential sources like friends, family, and the brands they