Collaborative information seeking in tourism: A study of young Chinese leisure tourists visiting Australia

Abstract

People often travel in groups where information seeking occurs throughout the whole course of travel before various decisions can be made. This grounded-theory-based study investigates how small groups of young Chinese leisure tourists conduct collaborative information seeking (CIS) to support their joint decision-making as travelling to Australia. Most of existing literature in CIS are limited to workplace contexts. In addition, previous studies often failed to include the outcome of information seeking to better understand collaboration as a process of joint decision-making. This study aims to develop new models and theories of tourist CIS, propose appropriate methods to study CIS in leisure contexts and provide practical implication regarding the design of CIS tools and systems for tourists. The research contributes to existing understandings of CIS by exploring the understudied leisure context, investigating it in a broader framework of joint decision-making, and looking at a comprehensive project where CIS occurs instead of individual information seeking tasks.