Utanför 50-skyltarna Turisters informationssökning
This essay focuses on tourists' information seeking. The main focus was to examine whether there is a connection between how the informants in different tourist styles the different tourist styles are presented by Eva Wolf as the tourist of recreation, action, culture, compromise, and individualism seek information to their forthcoming vacation. The result was reached through a qualitative method, where ten informants with various tourist roles were interviewed separately. The informants were chosen by personal contacts. In addition to these interviews, three representatives from the tourist industry were contacted and interviewed by e-mail. Only two of those interviews were included. The method of examining this connection was to place the information sources in Höglund's and Persson's model for informal, formal, internal and external sources. An attempt to explain the informants' cognitive authorities was to ask them about the reliability of their information sources. Cognitive authority deals with a source's reliability to a certain person. The informants' need for tourist information could be seen as information of a temporary nature. The temporary information need consists of the tourist seeking new knowledge or improving former knowledge, for example through literature studies, the Internet or by asking friends and relatives. The conclusions indicate that the recreation tourist prefers the Internet and personal contacts. The action tourist prefers personal contacts, Internet and guidebooks, especially Lonely Planet. The culture tourists seek a lot of information on the Internet, they also use their own experience from earlier vacations and sometimes guidebooks. The individualists use mostly their own experience but also Internet and guidebooks. The tourist of compromise prefers information from the travel agency and library literature collections. However, many of the informants belong in several tourist styles which make a strict categorization difficult.