Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
22
Dynamics of tourists'
decision-making
From theory to practice
Antónia Correia, Metin Kozak and Manuel Tão
Introduction
Tourism marketing is all about tourists. The effects of marketing on tourists start well before the
trip, and fi nish long after, if they end at all. A tourist displays a particular behaviour when
purchasing tourism products. First of all, the acquisition of services takes place prior to their
consumption. Such a lag between the act of acquisition and consumption can be typifi ed by the
fact that a given journey begins long before the act of boarding a plane to reach a certain holiday
location. Far from their own domestic environment, the tourist becomes emotionally fragile and
to alleviate this they search for more information about destination features. Even when the
holiday time is over, the consumption of the tourism product may not have been completed, in
the sense that registered emotions are captured and 'frozen' by photos and fi lms, to be shared
with relatives and friends. Finally, the decision-making is also constrained by the diffi culty of
having full information prior to the consumption of tourism products; this constraint arises on
information sources available and cognitive processing limitations (Correia 2002). These effects
have to be measured throughout the tourist decision-making process.
Although there is not a body of scientifi c knowledge about tourist behaviour, researchers
have adapted the fundamental/seminal theories of consumer behaviour in order to understand
tourists. Like consumer behaviour, tourist behaviour is a multidisciplinary fi eld of study,
drawing on economics, sociology, psychology and anthropology, supporting the optimization
of marketing strategies. Tourist behaviour derives from consumer behaviour research, but
distinguishes itself from that major study area due to paradoxical characteristics of the tourist
product. To buy a trip or a holiday is both a demanding effort and an enthusiastic pleasure.
It both demands and requests a high level of involvement from the individual because it involves
decisions about many aspects, in an uncertain context that brings about risk and anxiety. Tourist
behaviour presents particularities that derive from and are the result of the specifi cation of the
tourism product itself.
Hence, tourism has what March and Woodside (2005) call a purchase-consumption system,
a complex and inter-reliant process with multiple phased options to be overcome by the
tourist. Despite the number of researchers around the topic, models of tourists' decision-making
