Tourist Internet information search motivation: An empirical study of backpackers of university students

Internet has being increasingly playing an important role in searching tourism information for tourists before making a purchase decision. However, there exit benefits and costs for tourists during Internet information search. The aim of this study is to discuss relationship between tourists´ motivation and benefits and risks of Internet information search from information economics. The finding shows that respondents are divided into four groups after cluster analysis was applied on the perceived benefit and risk of backpacking. The name of the four groups is “high-benefit low-risk”, “high-benefit high-risk”, “low-benefit low-risk” and “low-benefit high-risk”. According to a chi-square test, the groups display significant difference in their information search motivation on the Internet.