Semantics of Online Tourism and Travel Information Search on the Internet: A Preliminary Study Bing Pan and Daniel R. Fesenmaier National Laboratory for Tourism and eCommerce University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA {bingpan, drfez}@uiuc.edu Abstract This article focuses on semantic network analysis as a means to investigate issues of usability of the Internet for travel information search. Usability of the Internet is viewed as the degree of match between mental models of information providers and information users, which are based on their understanding of information structure and information content on the Internet. The mismatch of mental models between the tourism marketers and the travelers contributed to the poor usability of the Internet as a travel information source. By investigating these two types of mental models using semantic network analysis, it can not only reveal their discrepancies, but also provide guidelines for effective information provision on the Internet. The authors focus on exploring the mental models of travel information providers though semantic network analysis when they market their destinations on the Internet, and provide a prelimi- nary result for the semantic network. Keywords: Semantic Network; Travel Information Search; Internet; Mental Model. 1 Introduction The tremendous development and the use of the Internet have transformed the land- scape of our society including the tourism industry (Werthner and Klein, 1999). Considerable research in marketing and consumer behavior have been done regarding the nature of the Internet, the usability of web sites, and the marketing and advertising strategies on the Internet (Hoffman and Novak, 1996; Ho, 1997; Hoger, Cappel, and Myerscough 1998; Sterne, 1999; Kaye and Medoff, 1999; Hofacker, 2000). However, the research focusing on usability of the Internet is not only pertinent to communica- tion, human-computer interaction (HCI), ergonomics and information science re- search, but also relevant to all aspects of the use of information. Because of its ever- changing nature of information technology, a developmental view of information technology and a focus on the nature of information exchange will be appropriate for the research on usability of the Internet (Nielson, 1993; Pan and Fesenmaier, 2000). This article focuses attention on semantic network analysis as a useful tool to investi- gate issues of usability of information systems. The poor usability of the Internet can be viewed as a mismatch between the mental models of information providers and