Heuristic and systematic information processing in online hotel booking

Underpinned by the information processing theory, this research examines how tourists process various hotel attributes during making a booking decision. A mixed-method approach was adopted, comprising a MouseLab experiment and in-depth interviews. Study 1 systematically examined critical information processing during hotel booking in simulated online hotel booking scenarios. In Study 2, in-depth interviews were used to gain deep insights into how participants integrated information to make decisions. Study 1 reveals that they widely adopt the attraction search heuristic that streamlines the information search process, whereas Study 2 suggests that the systematic thought of “value for money” accompanies the efficient search heuristics. Overall, our work suggests that decision makers smartly switch between heuristic and systematic information processing to make hotel booking decisions. This research makes significant theoretical and methodological contributions to extant tourism literature by integrating experimental work and qualitative interviews for hospitality research under the same framework.