Tourist Behaviour

This volume tackles in a fresh way many of the core topics in tourist behaviour. While it is no way a second edition to one of the author s earliest books - The Social Psychology of Tourist Behaviour, Oxford Pergamon, 1982 - it does follow in part the structure of that volume, and covers parallel territory. The benefit of nearly 25 years of research, and the changing face of tourism and global travel are reflected in many ways in the present work. There are now a variety of promising schemes and mini theories, conceptual schemes as they will be referred to in this book, which help illuminate long standing tourist behaviour topics. 

While it is appropriate to record the special efforts of local colleagues there are also wider influences contributing to the enthusiasm for writing about this area. Colleagues in the Unites States, notably Joe O Leary and Alastair Morrison, have been good friends, interested observers and at times partners in the author s work. A set of colleagues in Asia, the United Kingdom, Europe and Africa have helped the author maintain an interest in the usefulness and diverse applicability of tourist behaviour across cultures. 

Additionally the term tourist behaviour is useful to both link and differentiate the material from the broader yet distinctively different literature describing consumer behaviour. The nature of these differences will be explored later in this chapter. 

A further dimension of interest in the present volume that extends the study beyond a personal perspective lies in the geographical reach and scope of the material considered. A partial focus of this volume will be on emerging studies of tourist behaviour in Asia but these additional contributions will be viewed against a backdrop of several decades of work conducted predominantly in North America, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Some insights from European scholars will also be considered in select chapters. 

An important step in moving towards a professional appraisal of tourist behaviour lies in recognising that there are multiple perspectives on behaviour. In particular one important approach arising out of research in linguistics and anthropology is the etic-emic distinction (Pike, 1966 Triandis, 1972). An emic approach is one that takes the perspective of the participant - the person engaging in the behaviour. The topic of interest... 

To complete the framework of relevant terms there are other circumstances where a person might be labelled a patient, a player, a spectator, an audience or a crowd member and some of these studies will be relevant to the interest in tourism. Nevertheless the focus of the volume will be specifically on tourists and tourist behaviour. 

First, tourist behaviour tends to matter to tourists. People are concerned with their life experience - what they do - and they like to understand it. So, one answer to the question is that tourists themselves are very concerned with their own experiences and how to maximise each one, whether it be a short regional visit or an extended international holiday. 

A second answer to the question is that tourist behaviour matters to people who are making decisions about tourists. There is a whole array of such decision-makers. They may be people in the public sector who provide permits for tour operators they may be managers who let others go to the Great Barrier Reef or white-water rafting, or canoe down one of the scenic rivers in North America. All sorts of people are concerned with tourist behaviour because their job involves making an enabling decision or policy choice about tourist activities. 

A subdivision in the types of decision making clarifies the kinds of people involved. There are public decision-makers who make either policy or management decisions about on-site behaviour. There are marketers in joint public-private cooperative endeavours whose interests include such factors as what will influence travellers to come to place A, B or C. There are also business decision makers concerned with the design and financial success of tourism products. These kinds of interests focus on what tourists will prefer and how they make their travel choices and purchases. Tourism industry lobby groups may also be interested in select tourist behaviour issues, particularly topics such as user-pays fees and taxes on activities. 

There are further groups who are less frequently interested in tourist behaviour. For example, if tourists are creating certain kinds of impacts (maybe positive ones such as economic impacts, or even negative sociocultural and environmental impacts), the local community and then the media may find tourist behaviour noteworthy. In turn political comment... 

Figure 1.1 To whom does tourist behaviour matter ...

Approaching Tourist Behaviour Links to other study topics in tourism... 

The topic of tourist behaviour depends upon, interacts with, and occasionally determines other components of tourism. Tourist behaviour is powerfully connected to and often contingent upon marketing activities it strongly shapes the wellbeing of many small businesses, and it can generate considerable socio-cultural and environmental impacts. These influences should not, however, be extended too far. Tourist behaviour is indirectly connected to tourism issues such as globalisation and localisation it influences only peripherally major financial decisions on infrastructure investment and as a specific topic it attracts relatively little attention in governmental policies. 

There are several critical dimensions that create differences between tourist behaviour and consumer behaviour. One such major difference lies in the extended phases that surround tourist activities. Clawson and Knetsch (1966) identified five such phases. They noted (1) an anticipation or pre-purchase (2) a travel to the site segment, (3) an on-site experience, (4) a return travel component, and (5) an extended recall and recollection stage. 

Consumer behaviour, as a field of inquiry with its own journals, textbooks and courses, is centrally focused on the choices of products and the satisfaction with products (Bagozzi et ah, 2002 Schutte Carlante, 1998). In each phase of tourist behaviour outlined by Clawson and Knetsch, some differences from the standard consumer behaviour studies can be noted. In the first anticipation phase, many tourists plan for and fantasise about their forthcoming travel for months, sometimes years ahead. While this might be similar for the purchase of a motor vehicle, it is somewhat absurd when... 

For both the travel to the site and the return travel phases of tourist behaviour there is no sensible analogy in the consumer behaviour literature. Yet, the anticipatory elements of tourist experiences are heightened by the need to access the visited location and such travel is often an integral part of the total experience. Further, and from a business perspective, the pre- and post-travel phases are important subcomponents of the total expenditure that travellers must make to access the on-site experience. 

The distinctive phases of tourist behaviour study have stimulated a number of conceptual approaches and concerns in the literature. For... 

Another marked difference between much consumer behaviour and tourist behaviour is that the latter is a part of a very social business. Tourism is a people-to-people business in both its consumption and its production. Tourists are frequently with others, and often jointly decide upon and frequently share their tourist experience. The businesses that serve tourists (the hotels, the airlines, the tour operators, the attractions) and the larger visited community (who are sometimes passive extras in the total tourism production) are inherently performers on a social stage (Crang, 1997). It is therefore important to treat models of consumer behaviour built on nonsocial modes of production and consumption with some caution if attempts to extrapolate them to tourist choice and satisfaction are attempted. 

A particular instance of this difficulty of extrapolating a consumer behaviour model to tourist behaviour lies in the treatment of expectations and their role in satisfaction. The topic will be pursued in more detail in Chapter 7 but it is sufficient to note here that the match is inexact. As de Botton observed when writing about arriving in Barbados ... 

There is a further non-trivial distinction between consumer products and the opportunities that arise from travel purchases. Most consumer products of some complexity come with an owner s manual. These kinds of documents provide operational instructions, safety hints, advice on replacement parts or persons to whom one can direct service inquiries. Perhaps the closest parallel in the world of tourist behaviour is the guidebook. Even here, however, there is a range of guide books for any one place. The holiday consumer is free to consult multiple owner manuals, to redesign and further refine his or her experience. Tourists interact with their destination and this mutual influence process is sometimes assisted by... 

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