Towards the Design of Human-Centred e-Tourism Systems

Abstract

Consumer research into Internet usage has typically focussed on areas such as information search behaviour and the technologies that ensure smooth webpage navigation and security of transactions. Little attempt has been made to identify and interpret consumers’ emotional responses to websites, despite the extensive marketing literature into emotions and their impact on consumer behaviour (Machleit and Eroglu, 2000). This paper therefore poses the question: What elements and parts of web pages generate positive and/or negative emotional responses from the viewers? We offer the conceptual foundation for a proposed large-scale research and software development project. The setting for the proposed research is the tourism industry.