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Revealed preference experiments considering intrapersonal determinants are less common
and, even when applied, generally only include socio-demographic variables (e.g. Morley
1992; Eyamn and Ronning 1997; Riera 2000) whilst an even more limited number include
variables such as trip motivations, past experience or holiday experience (Eyamn and
Ronning 1997; Fesenmaier 1988; Correia, Santos and Barros 2007). These choice models
mostly rely on multinomial logit models which allow researchers to assess how preferences
for a certain destination may increase if a certain attribute is improved, despite the
importance of assessing the moderator role of destination attributes to redesign tourism
marketing strategies. The likelihood of this attribute moderating tourist choice is barely assessed
as it is assumed that all the other attributes remain unchangeable. Furthermore, this method
estimates preferences at the global sample level, which does not allow representation of individual
preferences.
Stated preference approaches assess the ranking or scoring preferences of hypothetical choice
alternatives (Timmermans and Golledge 1989; Batsell and Louviere 1991), and have been widely
used to assess willingness to choose, mostly in transport research (Balcombe, Fraser and Harris
2009; Dennis 2007). These approaches have been widely criticized as well, due to the fact that
they do not refl ect reality (real choices). Intentions may not coincide necessarily with tourists'
behaviour in the end (Kroes and Sheldon 1988).
Extending tourism destination choice research
Despite the importance of these models, tourist behaviour modelling still suffers from serious
drawbacks, especially in terms of the restrictions because none of them include psychological
factors. On the other hand, Kahneman and Tversky (1979), based on cognitive psychology,
developed the prospect theory that appears to offer a better approach as it develops and extends
CCB with psychological factors, namely intuition, emotionality and perception, recognizing the
interdisciplinary nature of consumer behaviour.
The interdisciplinary nature of consumer behaviour has given rise to two distinct groups of
models (Sirakaya, Uysal and Mclellan 1996): structural models and processional models. The
structural models examine the relationship between an input (stimulus) and an output (response)
(Abelson and Levi 1985). The processional models examine individuals' decisions, concentrating
on the cognitive processes (the transformation processes between the input and the output) that
are generated prior to the fi nal decision being taken (Abelson and Levi 1985). In other words,
the fi rst set of models focus on determinants of tourists' choice whereas processional models
focus on the stages (choice-sets) that the process of choice comprised.
Those models have common propositions: they are based on human rationality. Tourists
are rational beings, the Homo-economicus, even if some acknowledge the existence also of
psychological and social factors infl uencing the decision (for example, Mayo and Jarvis 1981;
Woodside 2004). Tourists are also perceived as individual decision-makers, and most of these
models have been more concerned with the decision of where to travel, that is, destination
choice, than with whether or not tourists will have holidays. Only more recently has the primary
decision of travelling or not, that is the participation decision, begun to appear in the literature
(Woodside 2004), as well as the role of motivations as psychological variables and also the
infl uence of social environment. In fact, tourism is a social activity and some evidence has been
found that suggests it is more an interpersonal decision than an individualistic one; and also
as tourism is an emotional experience with memorable events, the tourist decision is not only
rational but is also affective; last but not least, tourism models so far are parsimonic, meaning that
they are very complex and so diffi cult to test.
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