Keywords

1 Introduction

The travel industry becomes increasingly digitized accompanied by the fusion of offline experience and online decision-making [1]. Industry report showed that the scale of China’s online travel transaction has reached 593 billion RMB [2]. It was reported that a majority of travelers relied on information technology and digital applications to collect destination information and arrange travel planning [3]. Because of the relatively high costs (both monetary and non-monetary) and information-intensive nature, travel decisions are complex and highly involving [4]. These features of travel decisions make the industry highly reliant on technology [5].

The proliferation of social media has further strengthened the connection between tourism and technology [3, 6, 7]. Social media refer to “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content” [8]. Two basic features of social media, i.e. information exchanging and social interaction, have transformed the nature of travel decision-making. On one hand, the information exchanging via social media enables travelers to gather the first-hand destination information from others who share but not for monetary rewards [6, 9]. On the other hand, the social characteristics of social media allows travel stakeholdersFootnote 1 to make decisions collaboratively. As travel stakeholders may disperse geographically, social media become a necessity to communicate and make traveling plans.

Although several studies have explored the role of social media in tourism, two gaps still exist. First, while many studies have examined the information feature of social media [6, 9], few concerned the social feature in collaborative travel planning. Tourism literatures have proposed personal features and travel characteristics would shape individuals’ travel decision-making [10]. However, travel decision makers should be addressed as groups and not only as individuals because (a) mostly, travel decision-making is a social process, and (b) social interaction is also a major motive for traveling [11]. Collaborative travel planning is more complex than individual decision-making because of diverse preferences and interpersonal conflicts. Therefore, conclusions drawn from individual decision-making cannot be simply applied in the context of collaborative travel planning.

Second, few studies took a technological perspective in understanding how to facilitate collaborative travel planning via social media. Prior studies on group decision support system (GDSS) have found that merely introducing media led low-quality group performance [12]. Therefore, technological features of social media, interfaces in particular, call for further investigation for collaborative travel planning.

To fill the two gaps, this working paper developed the system prototype to assist collaborative travel planning. Drawing on media synchronicity theory, we considered four interfaces: (1) the basic dialog-flow interface, which is widely used in popular instant messaging tools; (2) the user-centered interface, which adds a user-centered window next to the dialog-flow window; (3) the wiki-mode interface, which adds a wiki-mode board next to the dialog-flow window; (4) and the integrated interface which incorporates both user-centered and wiki-mode windows. And a lab experiment is designed to test the effectiveness of the four interfaces. This study aims to contribute to the literature on group decision in the context of traveling and provide implications for the tourism industry.

The rest of this study proceeds as follows. We first reviewed prior research of social media in tourism. Then we reviewed literature on media synchronicity theory, which guide our design logic for this study. Interface design was presented, followed by our experiment design. We finally listed future research plan.

2 Literature Review

2.1 Social Media in Tourism

The research on the influence of social media on tourism consumption behavior are concentrated in three areas. First, the role and mechanism of social media in the tourism marketing process [13, 14]; second, incentives for tourists to share information to their social media accounts [15]; third, motivation for potential tourists to utilize social media information in destination information collection [6, 7]. However, several gaps still exist and call for further research.

First, for potential tourism consumers, the “social” role of social media needs to be further analyzed [16]. The common “read-comment-respond” practice of social media in tourism is a semi-duplex process, i.e., an interactive mode in which one party shares information, other user reviews, and one party responds again, which leads various problems such as time lag and information asymmetry. The social feature may better facilitate the synchronous process in interpersonal information cooperation and collaborative decision making, while limited studies concerned this.

Second, what kinds of social media interfaces are more conducive to support travel planning are worthy of experimental research. Given the technological interfaces impacted the process of collaborative decision-making, it is necessary to combine the characteristics of tourism decision-making and social media interactive communication to design interface to better support collaborative travel planning.

2.2 Media Synchronicity Theory

Media synchronicity theory (MST) predicts that effectiveness of communication and task performance are related to the capabilities of a medium. MST proposes that all task performing is composed of two fundamental communication processes: conveyance and convergence [17]. Conveyance processes and convergence processes differ in the need of information exchanging and processing. Specifically, conveyance focuses on the transmission of a variety of new and relevant information, while convergence focuses on developing mutual understanding for exchanged information [17, 18]. Therefore, the effectiveness of communication and task performance would be enhanced when the capabilities of a medium meet the requirements of communication processes. In general, convergence benefits from media that support a high level of synchronicity, while conveyance benefits from media with less synchronicity [18].

Synchronicity refers to “a shared pattern of coordinated synchronous behavior with a common focus” [17] (p. 581), could be support given the capabilities of a medium, which includes transmission velocity, parallelism, symbol variety, rehearsability, and reprocessability [17, 19]. MST has been widely applied to investigate the role of media capabilities in team communication and collaboration [20], conflict management [21], and e-learning [22]. Unlike previous theory, MST argues that no one medium outperforms under any circumstances or is best for both conveyance and convergence. Thus, MST particularly suits the social media context because it often contains multiple media that are used in combination by users [23].

3 Interface Design

Communication in a collaborative group is reflected as user-generated content that is organized interactively and in real time. According to this identification, collaborative communication can be decomposed along three dimensions.

  1. 1.

    Time dimension. Social media facilitate synchronous, dialogue-flow communication among group members. In our context, travel stakeholders interactively provide information, give travel proposals, discuss and comment on others’ proposals. The existing interface of social media communication is organized along time dimension, that is, user-generated information is presented as dialogue flow in real time. The dialogue-flow interface constitutes the basic design in this study.

  2. 2.

    User dimension. Group members, or in our context, travel stakeholders, are the basic units in collaborative travel planning. Individual travel stakeholder may have their own preference and constraint (budget and time). The diversity may bring innovative ideas to the final travel plan, but also make it difficult to reach a convergent plan. An interface that explicates individual opinion may overcome the flaw of the existing dialogue design that real-time dialogue information is fragmented and it is difficult to trace back to early personal opinions.

  3. 3.

    Content dimension. User-generated content is the core of collaborative communication. The key of travel planning is information sharing and collaborative decision-making. To update with newly input information and present temporal agreements, a wiki-mode content model flushes into our mind. Wiki model is also known as commons-based peer production, by which individuals provide small fragments of content that gradually add up to a common decision [24].

This study developed four interfaces that address either one aspect of the three dimensions, or an integration of more than one dimension.

  1. 1.

    The basic dialog-flow interface, which addresses the time dimension discussed above. The dialog-flow design is widely used in popular instant messaging tools.

  2. 2.

    The user-centered interface, which adds a user-centered window next to the dialog-flow window. This interface emphasizes the feature of user dimension.

  3. 3.

    The wiki-mode interface, which adds a wiki-mode board next to the dialog-flow window.

  4. 4.

    The integrated interface, which incorporates both user-centered and wiki-mode windows.

In the user-centered interface, each user can establish his/her own information book, in which he/she can add, delete or update travel information. Users’ information is split but visible to all others. In the wiki-mode interface, content is organized just as Wikipedia: travel information is structured to different parts (destination, travel time, transportation, travel fee and detailed plan). Each user can edit travel information in different parts, and all modifications are all recorded and can be reviewed by others. Through the above discussion, we can easily detect that the dialog-flow interface is the basic design and advanced functions are added to it to improve the assistance to collaborative decision-making.

We only display the integrated interface to illustrate our design in Fig. 1 because it contains all elements of other interfaces.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

The integrated interface. 1-dialogure-flow interface. 2-dialogue functions (connect; disconnect; check; full screen; send). 3-dialogure content. 4-user-centered interface. 5-Update. 6-wiki-mode. 7-edit functions. 8-Collaborative content in wiki-mode.

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Drawing on media synchronicity theory, we expect that integrating the user-centered interface and the wiki-mode interface to the basic dialogue-flow interface will afford information conveyance and decision convergence, respectively. The user-centered interface allows the messaged to be organized based on the sender (tagged as 2 in Fig. 1). Organizing information through a personal space will be quite helpful to conveyance processes because of the need of exchanging large amount of new and raw information [17]. However, the user-centered interface has negative effects on developing a common focus during the communication because the independent space for each participant could distract attention, thus lowering the level of synchronicity. Therefore, we expect that conveyance processes will benefit from the user-centered interface but convergence processes do not.

The wiki-mode interface reflects fundamental characteristics of the real-world Wikis, such as open, universal, unified, observable, and convergent [25]. The universal and convergent nature of wikis allows participants to understand “what we have known” or “what we have done” based on mutual agreements, even temporarily. From this perspective, the wiki-mode interface will be helpful on developing common understanding which is the focus in convergence processes. However, the unified and convergent nature wikis will exert deindividualization during communication, which might produce conflicts and undermine conveyance processes. Thus, we expect that convergence processes will benefit from the wiki-mode interface but conveyance processes do not.

In this study, three indicators of collaborative travel planning outcome will be considered: time to reach convergent plan, group satisfaction of the final plan and individual user’s perceived degree of compromises for the convergent plan. Based on our statements, we develop several basic propositions.

Proposition 1.

Participants will use the least time to reach convergent plan when using the integrated interface, and participants will use the most time to reach convergent plan when using the basic dialog-flow interface.

Proposition 2.

Participants will have the highest level of satisfaction of the final plan when using the integrated interface, and participants will have the lowest level of satisfaction of the final plan when using the basic dialog-flow interface.

Proposition 3.

Participants will have the highest level of perceived degree of compromises when using the wiki-mode interface, and participants will have the lowest level of perceived degree of compromises when using the user-centered interface.

4 Experiment Design

The developed interfaces form the experimental foundation for future research. We intend to conduct a series of lab experiments to investigate the combinatory effect of technological interface and group design on the performance of collaborative travel planning. The independent variables in the experiments will include technological interfaces, group size, group type (friends or strangers), existence of choice set or not, decision-making stages (information cooperation and decision-making), time pressure and so on. Additional independent variables will be considered to serve our future research. Three indicators of collaborative travel planning outcome will be evaluated: time to reach convergent plan, group satisfaction of the final plan and individual user’s perceived degree of compromises for the convergent plan. The experimental procedures are designed as followings.

  1. 5.

    Experiment subjects will be recruited from a China university. Subjects were grouped according to group size and group type, in terms of strangers or friends.

  2. 6.

    All subjects will be told that their task is to discuss with other group members to arrange a 3-day travel plan for the coming holiday. A convergent decision with detailed plan (including accommodation, transportation, schedule, activity and so on) is demanded. As incentives, their completed travel plan could possibly be supported by monetary award. Therefore, the task and award are closely associated with subjects’ real travel decision.

  3. 7.

    Subjects will discuss and make decisions in the collaborative travel planning system (Fig. 2). All collaborative groups will be randomly assigned to one of the four interfaces. Group members will have 5 min to get familiar with each other, the interface and the function of the system. After the 5 min, a specific instruction about the task will be given. 30 min will be left to them for travel planning.

    Fig. 2.
    figure 2

    log interface and personal setting interface. (1-setting; 2-basic information; 3-change head portrait; 4-change code; 5-update head portrait)

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5 Implication and Future Research Plan

This study will contribute to literate in two main aspects. First, our exploration of collaborative travel planning addresses the social affordance of social media. While prior research has emphasized the importance of social media in providing user-generated travel information, we noticed the gap that few have direct the value of social media towards real decision-making process, that is, travel planning. As travel is a highly social event and travel decision is mostly made by groups, it is important to introduce the idea of collaborative decision-making into travel planning. Second, this study has both theoretical and practical implications through introducing new collaborative interfaces. Noticing that barely relying on social tools for collaborative decision may result in low-quality group performance, this study aims to develop and test different interfaces in facilitating collaborative travel planning.

Our future research will focus on the effectiveness of different interfaces in assisting different-stage cooperation and collaboration. The experiment we have depicted in this study will be conducted to collect first-hand data.