انگیزه خرید مسافران هوایی و رفتارهای اطلاع یابی

This study investigates the motivations of shoppers at Taiwan's Taoyuan International Airport. From a sample of over 500 individuals, we find that motivations are similar to in-store shoppers elsewhere, with travel and airport motivations being a special factor depending on the airport shopping environment and local shopping cultures. While decision convenience is the main factor concerning air passengers' information seeking in a terminal, other factors such as free time before boarding, involvement, and group travelling exercise differential effects on the information seeking behaviour of air passenger groups. This result suggests the heterogeneous information seeking behaviour patterns and implies the importance of using various strategies in providing airport retail information.

Retail concession businesses is often an important element in the overall financial portfolio of an airport business; including 23% of revenue for Sydney Airport in 2007, 22% for London Heathrow Airport in 2006, to the 26% for Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in 2007. In this context, passengers' shopping expenditure patterns can be investigated using historical sales data and purchase surveys, but little is known about the heterogeneous shopping preferences of passengers or how they seek airport shopping information before arriving at the airport and when waiting for departure in terminals. Airport management is aware that passengers are a ‘captured audience’, but to maximize the benefits of this, they need to know: What type of information passengers seek to assist their purchase decisions before and after arriving at the airport? How their spending can be stimulated through information at specific places, targeted to a certain passenger type? To what extent are air passengers' purchasing behaviours rational, and do these behaviours differ from that of consumers in shopping malls? Are the physical information channels available in airports effective in assisting passengers' information searches and purchase decisions?

Functional, experiential, and rational factors have been found to drive airport shopping behaviour, although in different ways across apathetic, traditional, and mood shoppers, and shopping lovers; findings similar to those of Geuens et al. (2004). Given various motivations, the four shopper types demonstrate different retail information seeking behaviour. As may be expected, traditional shoppers, mood shoppers, and shopping lovers exhibited more information seeking effort compared to apathetic shoppers; and this is particularly evident in passengers' pre-trip shopping information seeking and when wandering through terminals. The three non-apathetic shopper types, however, have different on-site information seeking behaviour, with shopping lovers and mood shoppers using on-site information sources but traditional shoppers becoming apathetic at the airport. Regarding factors influencing shoppers' behaviour, decision convenience had the strongest relationship with air passengers' behaviour, both pre-trip and on-site. Thus, although passengers typically face pressure to be at the boarding gate by a certain time, in a large enclosed and unfamiliar space, where they can become lost easily, an environment that enables convenient shopping decisions can prompt passengers to use all retail information sources. Conversely, shopping involvement and waiting time before boarding are not significant, perhaps because the questions posed were not specific to the airport studied.