Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
19
Theorizing tourist behaviour
Alain Decrop
Introduction
In today's highly competitive and global economy, understanding tourist behaviour and
consumption is crucial both for private companies, public operators and citizens. First, leisure
and travel companies have to narrowly understand the needs and desires of their target customers
as a key aim and critical success factor. Designing, communicating, and selling a product or
service is diffi cult if it does not match consumers' expectations. Understanding tourist behaviour
is important for public operators as well in order to effectively address consumers' wishes and to
develop relevant laws and policies for informing and protecting them. Finally, understanding
behaviour and consumption is also useful for tourists and travellers themselves. It may help them
to make 'good' decisions or to be more critical towards commercial information sources that are
likely to infl uence their preferences and choices.
Understanding tourists is even more critical today as they appear to be more demanding
and changeable, and they show complex preference structures and decision patterns.
Choosing, buying and consuming tourism/travel products and services involves a range of
psycho-social processes and a series of personal and environmental infl uences that researchers
and managers ought take into account. This chapter aims to provide an overview of such
processes and infl uences, and to explain the basic theories that underlie tourist behaviour.
Such theories borrow from a variety of disciplines, including economics, psychology,
sociology and anthropology highlighting the multidisciplinarity of the fi eld. Initially, the focus
is on defi ning and presenting the paradigms that may be used for researching tourist
behaviour. The following section theorizes tourist decision-making (DM) and the tourism
experience, which constitute the two major dimensions of tourist behaviour. The reader
should note that although many principles and theories presented below are relevant whatever
the cultural context, this chapter presumes a western European focus as to the general statements
and illustrations given.
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