Consumer Behaviour in Tourism

The immense tourism offer available able to fulfil the individual needs leads the way to interchangeable products. For the consumer it doesn’t make much of a difference whether travelling to destination A or B, with the tour operator X or Y etc. Actually, with all the communication channels and the more and more detailed information available the consumer is in a state of information overload. Impossible to consider everything! Thus, the holiday decision is not the final result of a comprehensive search- evaluate choice process but a good-enough solution considering a few aspects of a few products from a few information sources. Rational arguments are not very important. This is the state consumer researcher call “low involvement”. This book tries to structure the impacts of a world in change on the consumer’s behaviour in tourism and to identify some of the aspects being the most important for the foreseeable future. Focusing on the consumer the book does not ignore the importance of the tourism offer, the industry, the destinations etc. They constitute some of the factors leading to a change in consumer behaviour, and they are together with others the field where the behaviour of the consumers shows up and where the knowledge of the consumer can be applied.