Consumer Behavior in Tourism and Hospitality Research: Volume 13

The choice overload (CO) phenomenon, whereby having many options leads to negative consequences, has been studied widely in psychology and marketing. However, empirical evidence of CO in the tourism context is limited, even though people often encounter numerous choices (e.g., vacation destinations, airfares, hotels, tours) at different stages when planning their holidays. Investigating CO in tourism and hospitality is important because (online) travel advisors are providing tourists with numerous choices, yet they do not know whether or not these decision makers are content after choosing from these large choice sets. This chapter proposes to review and apply insights garnered from the CO literature to tourism research. Accordingly, the chapter proposes five groups of solutions for tourists and travel advisors to avoid CO effects: reducing decision task difficulty, reducing choice-set complexity, reducing preference uncertainty, focusing on decision goals rather than the means to achieve those goals, and adopting appropriate decision-making styles.

This research uses interpretive phenomenology to investigate the effect of visitor–destination interactions and image formation. It seeks to understand the processes that lead the visitor to make sense of his destination experience for her/himself and to others, and transmit that image through his story. A subjective personal introspective SPI and longitudinal observation have been used to collect data and acquire an insider perspective on the image of France as a place experienced by an Asian researcher who is living, experiencing, working, visiting, and traveling in France. The results of this research tend to move the understanding of destination image formation forward by taking a holistic approach that allows researching personal image perception and construction from genuine insider perspective as it is qualified by the individual within his own experiences. The main contribution of this research is to show how the image of a destination might evolve from a tourism destination to a mundane consumption place. This idea emphasizes the transformation of a tourist to a nontourist consumption place.

This study increases understanding of the influence of Russian culture and society on travel practices during Soviet times and now, through the subjective experiences of Russian women. Based on the life-history narratives concerning travel of Russian women who lived in the USSR and worked for the government, the study explores features of traveling during Soviet and Russian times: norms and rules, gender aspects, Russianness and habitus. Both culture and governmental restrictions and societal rules affected how women traveled in Soviet times. This study demonstrates how historical and social contexts and habitus were significant for women in the past and continue to be so in the present, as well as how they have affected these women’s travel practices. By drawing on social reality, gender literature, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, and sociohistoric patterning of consumption from the research domain of consumer culture theory, this study seeks to fill the gap in understanding the significance of these aspects for travel practices.

This study examines how travel-related patterns of behavior on Facebook (FB) differ among users of different gender, age, and education. The authors assumed that females, young, and more educated people are more active in using FB for travel-related purposes and that the results will show a significant difference in their travel-related behavior patterns. Data about respondent’s travel-related behavior on FB were collected through an online survey (Google Docs) through the FB page named “The research on behaviors of FB users.” The study applies the multivariate general linear model (GLM) on the data collected from the total of 793 respondents. The results show that travel-related statuses respondents post on FB are generally about their travel destination. The main findings indicate that women, more educated, and older people are the ones who are the most active in sharing their travel-related information and are therefore target groups for promoting travel destinations via electronic word of mouth (eWOM). The study suggests target groups for promoting travel destinations via eWOM and it is the first research of this type done on a Serbian sample.

This study elucidates the relationships between the elements that visitors gaze at in a historical district and the objectives perceived to have been achieved. This study differs from previous studies on visitors’ evaluations of historical districts (carried out using the theoretical frameworks and methods of architectural/environmental psychology), because the research focuses on interpersonal differences in tourist gazes. Research was conducted between 09:30 and 14:00 on July 13, 2013 in front of the railway station, near the tourist information center in Sanmachi, and around the entrance to and in the waiting room of Takayama Jinya. One thousand visitors to Takayama city, Japan were asked to complete and return questionnaires, using stamped, pre-addressed envelopes. They were first asked whether they had seen 19 elements, and then asked to rate the impressiveness of those they had seen. Respondents also rated the extent to which seven objectives related to learning and interaction had been achieved during their visits. The findings suggest that visitors who gaze at various elements may strongly perceive opportunities to achieve their objectives, that is, learning about a destination and interacting with other people. For visitors who specifically focus on local elements that do not relate to people, opportunities for learning may not be curtailed, but then again, the chances to interact with others may not necessarily be facilitated. Gazing at the multifaceted aspects of a historical district appears to foster a visitor’s understanding of the district. Drawing upon these findings, future studies should investigate the effects of visitors’ pretravel motives on their gaze.

This chapter compares two protected natural parks as specific experiential contexts providing two different experiences for visitors: extraordinary and memorable versus ordinary and mundane (Carù & Cova, 2006, 2007). Each experiential context enables the distinction of actual visitors’ experiences (Pine & Gilmore, 1999) inside each park. A qualitative study collected information to differentiate each protected natural park based on three dimensions: the geophysical environment, the recreational practices, and product and service offer management. A quantitative study analyzed the effect of a specific experiential context through a comparison of actual visitors’ experiences on four dimensions (esthetics, escapism, education, and entertainment) in both countries (500 in each country). Results of the qualitative study show that the Taiwanese park provides an experiential context with more extraordinary and memorable experiences while the French park provides an experiential context with more ordinary and mundane experiences. The results of the quantitative study show the distinction of actual visitors’ experiences inside each park: more immersion through esthetics and escapism in Taiwan and more absorption through education and entertainment in France. Each park manager has to build one’s own positioning and should offer a unique experiential context based on the three dimensions to provide more extraordinary and memorable or more ordinary and mundane experiences. this study highlights the interest of an analysis framework of experiences adapted from Carù and Cova (2006, 2007) and Pine and Gilmore (1999) underlining the link between experiential context and actual experiences.

The focus of this study is on analyzing influencing factors of antisocial travel-related behaviors – in particular road rage. Building on the concept of redirection, the current chapter develops a theory of natural and planned redirection to derive starting points for demarketing antisocial behaviors. A fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) with survey data from 6,811 consumers from the DDB Life Style Study is used to gain insights into the individuals behind road rage. Results show that specific kinds of anti- and prosocial behavior associate with high and low levels of road rage, respectively. The study finds that these prosocial behaviors may function as natural redirection mechanisms and prevent or reduce road rage. Thereby, the findings extend previous analyses of road rage and allow for deriving theoretical and policy implications.

Consumer behavior in tourism (CBT) is an interdisciplinary field of study encompassing the basic behavioral and economic sciences (e.g., psychology, sociology, and economics) and applied fields of study (e.g., management, marketing, tourism, and hospitality) focusing on all aspects of discretionary travel. This chapter describes major issues and findings in the literature relating to CBT. The chapter directs the reader’s attention to some of the highly-cited studies in this literature – these studies provide a foundation of knowledge on the central topics, issues, methods, findings, and theoretical/practical contributions in research on CBT. Research studies in CBT focus on one-to-all five core theoretical issues in basic and applied fields of study: describe who is doing what, when, where, how, and the consequences of the activities; explain the meanings of activities and motivations of the actors; predict (model) what actions and outcomes will occur and the impacts of influence attempts before, during, and after engaging in tourist actions; control (influence) the beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and assessments of tourists, local community members, and additional stakeholders; evaluate tourism service/product delivery, tourism management performance, and customer satisfaction. Survey research using verbal (written) responses to questions is pervasive and the most frequent method for data collection in CBT. Additional research genres in CBT include direct observations of tourism behavior with or without some oral questioning (unobtrusive studies, the long interview method (McCracken, 1988), use of “consumer culture theory”), participant observation including semester abroad and unpaid internships away from home, formal field experiments, and the study of secondary sources (e.g., photographs and writings in blogs and social media (e.g., TripAdvisor) reviews).