There has, since the nineteen nineties, been a rapid increase in the use of the internet for marketing and selling tourist products, and internet-based tourism is now governed by keen competition between the providers/suppliers in the tourist trade. This creates a greater need for appropriate measures which will help providers distinguish themselves from other competitors and win customers for their offer. From a marketing-strategic point of view one approach to this problem is to convey product information in a more efficient and customer-friendly way. The 2D technologies currently used on the internet render such progress difficult, mainly because the immaterial nature of tourist goods creates a considerable difference, preceding a purchase, in the amount of information which are at the supplier’s and at the customer’s disposal respectively. The informational asymmetry respecting the quality of tourist services leads to a situation where the customer registers uncertainty and may abstain from effecting a purchase altogether, turning instead to other providers and/or products. There is a need to minimize these uncertainties arising from the informational asymmetry between the supplier and the customer by means of appropriate communication political activities. Computer-based three-dimensional representations (Virtual Reality) have been used to transmit complex information and matters in the areas of technology and natural science since the early nineties. In the tourist industry, in contrast to fields such as architecture, medicine and technical construction, the directed deployment of VR remains an exception; no systematic use is made of VR to provide information in the shape of three-dimensional and interactively accessible representations, and the introduction of such representations in a systematic way faces a number of difficulties: there exists a multitude of VR technologies differing in form and function, no criteria are available for classifying the different VR technologies, and little is known about the adequacy of such criteria from the customer’s point of view. The present work shows that VR is a technology which, from the point of view of the economics of information, is in principle capable of controlling the informational asymmetries between the travel agent and the customer, as well as reducing the uncertainties concerning the quality of the product concerned. It is important to emphasize here that using VR as a signal instrument in online communication the experience qualities, which prevail in the domain of travel products, can be transformed into search qualities and the significance/importance of credence qualities be reduced. VR can thus promote sales during the critical period of browsing in the course of which the customer decides to buy or not to buy, by making it easier for customers to assess relevant properties of tourist products, thereby strengthening the customer’s inclination to buy and preventing market failure due to underrepresentation (and misrepresentation) of information. A holiday resort built according to the criteria developed for selecting VR technologies has been used to test their adequacy from the user’s point of view, showing that users demand simple and fast representations of VR contents and a straightforward VR environment with limited options to navigate and interact. Complex navigation, more numerous and sophisticated interactive options within the VR environment as well as a design using geometrical objects for the exploration of the holiday resort appear to hold a subordinate place in the user’s estimation.
展开▼
