Using co-operative evaluation to explore travel and tourism

This paper reports on the use of ‘co-operative evaluation’ to investigate tourists' decision making behaviours when using Internet resources. Co-operative evaluation is a qualitative ‘think-aloud’ technique used to investigate usability problems in interactive systems. In this study, the technique is adapted to examine both interaction problems and decision-making activities of subjects attempting to plan a weekend break to Paris. The results show that existing general accounts of decision-making in e-commerce are not sufficiently rich to describe decision behaviours in tourism. Also, these accounts may be enhanced by reference to descriptions of tourism decision-making that pre-date the development of e-commerce. The findings also suggest that many existing web-based tools to support tourism decision-making are poorly matched to the needs of Internet users.