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Travelers often demonstrate the compromise effect—a tendency to choose the intermediate option(s) when facing difficult trade-off decisions. The compromise effect has been replicated in very specific settings where typically only two or three options were available. This research extends our understanding of the compromise effect by examining the impact of the number of options on travelers’ choices. Based on two different accounts (i.e., attribute distance account vs. decision complexity account), we predict that the compromise effect will be attenuated as the number of options in a choice set increases. Four experimental studies provide supporting evidence for this argument and support the attribute distance account as the main underlying mechanism. This research contributes to the extant tourism and travel choice literature by responding to the call to investigate the compromise effect in complex buying contexts.

Refereed/Peer-reviewed This article investigates how the perceived threats caused by COVID-19 affect consumers’ travel choices and actions by influencing their intentions to seek variety. Four studies show that the perceived threat of COVID-19 increases variety seeking in travel choices. Study 1 finds that travelers who perceive a greater threat of COVID-19 tend to undertake more varied activities during their travel. Study 2 shows that the main effect exists only for individuals who have previously visited the destination. Study 3 replicates the moderating effect of previous visiting experience by using a different way to manipulate the perceived threat of COVID-19. Study 4 illustrates the moderating impact of another important factor: the number of travelers included in the companies’ communication messages. The article concludes by discussing the theoretical and managerial implications of the findings.

This article investigates the role of diverse nudging communication strategies on perceived threat and stockpiling intention. Across three studies, the authors examined the various effects of “nudging” on consumer behavior. Study 1 demonstrates that a commonly used picture has a stronger impact on perceived threat than a less frequently exposed picture regardless of its accuracy. Study 2 shows that the perceived threat of COVID-19, in terms of severe health consequences, is lower when using an indirect (vs. direct) explanation of the virus, as well as when reducing the amount of information about the virus. Study 3 investigates the impact of salient negative information and childhood socioeconomic status (SES). Findings reveal that negative information about deaths associated with the virus increases the level of perceived threat and stockpiling intention, especially among people of low childhood SES.

The global increase in the elderly population has a direct influence on the travel, tourism, and hospitality sector because senior travelers have become major consumers. Therefore, developing a deeper understanding of senior motivations for overseas travel is required. However, the presence of theoretical and practical gaps limits the comprehension of this demographic market. Thus, this research sought to identify the underlying dimensionality and measurement of senior travel motivations and developed a scale to measure them. In addition, it validated the scale across future travel behaviors and preferences for tourism types and sites. An eight-factor structure of senior travel motivations was generated. The overall construct satisfied a series of convergent, discriminant, and nomological validity tests. Furthermore, the scale demonstrated a predictive explanatory power for profiling the future travel behavior and preference of seniors.

This research used three experimental studies to examine the effect of scarcity information on choosing a hotel room online. The studies also investigated the moderating role of the buyer’s childhood socioeconomic status (SES), using evolutionary perspectives and the life history theory. Our findings revealed that travelers showed a preference for a hotel room option if they were given information that the room was scarce. This preference was stronger for travelers who had low childhood SES and who were low in materialistic traits. The findings of this empirical research add academic value by adopting the roles of heretofore novel concepts, childhood SES and materialism, in understanding the effects of consumer information messaging. The findings also add to the understanding of how context in online websites substantially affects potential travelers’ decision making. Therefore, this research will provide helpful guidance for making online websites more user-friendly and effective in their promotions to potential customers.

This study was designed to investigate factors associated with Mainland China’s senior overseas travel motivations and the role in explaining preferences, sociodemographic and travel features. The study was conducted with 496 seniors. The statistical analyses included factor analysis, cluster analysis, one-way analysis of variance, and chi-square test. Result showed that eight domains defined the overseas travel motivations of Mainland Chinese seniors. Cluster analysis produced a five-cluster solution based on motivations. The cluster with lowest motivations were older, primary school graduates with lowest income and generally low set of preferences. Ultimately, understanding motivation can effectively promote travel among the aging population.

This study used a mixed methods approach to investigate Muslim traveler experiences of inconvenience while visiting Korea, combining focus groups and semistructured interviews (a qualitative approach), and questionnaire-based surveying (a quantitative approach). The authors investigated the reliability and validity of a customized structural model by merging covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) and partial least squares SEM (PLS-SEM). There were five salient and observable constructs which cause inconvenience for Muslims when visiting Korea. The results showed significant effects on the part of the identified constructs on affective experience, satisfaction, desire, behavior intention, and place attachment. The study findings can guide Korean tourism stakeholders in tackling the issues causing inconvenience for Muslim travelers, as well as informing authorities in other countries and territories.

Combining conceptual perspectives from emerging research on COVID-19, safety-seeking motivations, and extremeness aversion in choice (i.e., compromise effects), we examine how and why the perceived threat of COVID-19 affects consumers’ choice and decision making in the hotel and restaurant domains. Across seven studies (two studies from secondary data sets and five experimental studies), we provide novel evidence that the perceived threat or threat salience of COVID-19 amplifies the general tendency to select compromise options, avoiding extreme ones, within a choice set. We highlight the role of safety-seeking motivations as the underlying mechanism in the relationship between perceived threat and extremeness aversion in choice. We further document a boundary condition that the extremeness aversion effect is stronger for leisure travelers than for business travelers.

Unplanned purchases, such as same-day bookings for hotel stays, are an emerging trend. However, few studies have examined unplanned purchases, particularly luxury hospitality and tourism purchases. This study compares consumers’ unplanned purchases of luxury goods and experiences. Four studies of luxury consumers in Hong Kong and the United States show that unplanned purchases of luxury experiences (vs. luxury goods) increase positive emotions and that the underlying mechanism is escapism. This study also shows that the price of luxury experiences enhances escapism whereas the price of luxury goods does not. This study contributes to the literature by challenging the universally negative view of unplanned luxury purchases. Luxury marketers should appeal to consumers’ sense of escapism to induce unplanned purchases of luxury experiences. Further, luxury marketers should maintain the monetary exclusivity of luxury experiences.

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically affected everyday life and business. To describe the impacts, 566 COVID-19-related articles were published between January 2020 and March 2022 in 18 hospitality and tourism journals. This study identifies the research streams, using content and bibliometric analyses. Content analysis and co-citation analysis revealed six research streams and four research clusters, respectively. A critical analysis was conducted to reflect the theoretical and practical implications and provide suggestions for future research directions. The identified research weaknesses include concerns relating to generalizability, sampling and measurement-related issues, online survey methods, failure to identify different stakeholders’ views on the adoption of new technologies, lack of practical coping scheme studies, lack of effort to adopt multidisciplinary theories, and little exploration of customers’ reactions to virtual events. Results of this study can help facilitate and consolidate the knowledge on the impacts of the pandemic and proactively prepare for future disease crises.

This research investigated perceived risks associated with central bank digital currency (CBDC) payment innovations and their effect on travelers’ adoption behavior, considering personal and product characteristics. This quantitative study determined that perceived risks, including financial, performance, privacy, psychological, and time risks, have an adverse effect on attitudes toward CBDC payment, which, in turn, affects the intention to adopt. In addition, this study underlined the moderating roles of consumer innovativeness, previous experience, structural assurance, and media encouragement in the link between perceived risk and attitude. The results advanced the understanding of travelers’ intention to use CBDC to pay for tourism products and services.

Before understanding customers’ perceptions of hotel CSR, it is important to understand service providers’ responses to hotel CSR because they are the key person to implement the CSR strategy. Therefore, this study investigates the structural relationship among multidimensional CSR performance, attitude, emotions, and resultant behaviors as perceived by hotel employees. In addition, moderating role of employees’ positional levels in the proposed model is evaluated. The findings show that environmental, ethical, and financial/economic domains consisting of hotel CSR performance effectively explain the resultant behaviors that follow. However, social/philanthropic and legal domains do not have considerable effects. The positions held by hotel employees partially moderate the relationships between the proposed constructs. The results of this study add important insights to the existing literature and help hotel practitioners better understand how multidimensional CSR causes positive attitudes, emotions, and behaviors and how the structural model changes depending on the position levels. These results are achieved by using the newly developed hotel CSR measurement scale, which was made through careful and rigorous six-stage procedures.

This research investigated the role of price preciseness (rounded vs. precise) in perceiving deal attractiveness, purchase intention, and choice in travel decision-making. Two competing hypotheses (price association vs. fluency) were proposed. Across five empirical studies, we found that the perceived attractiveness of a price promotion deal, along with purchase intention and relative preference, were higher when the original price was presented in a rounded (vs. precise) format (Studies 1A, 1B, and 3). This finding supports the price association-based explanation rather than the fluency-based explanation. In addition, the results were replicated in a consequential choice setting (Study 2). We further demonstrated that the effect of the price rounding is stronger for those with high (vs. low) lay rationalism, suggesting its moderating role (Study 4). The empirical findings of the current research have theoretical implications for various fields, including the behavioral pricing of travel and tourism, and practical implications for practitioners.

Despite its increased recognition among tourism planners and destination governments, a lacuna exists regarding the motivation of diaspora tourists travelling to a destination they regard as an ancestral homeland. Thus, in the current research, we seek to develop and validate a scale that measures the motivations of diaspora tourists. The result of a rigorous seven-stage scale development procedure generates a five-factor structure for diaspora tourists’ motivations. The scale is successfully verified through various reliability and validity tests. This multidimensional scale of diaspora tourist motivations contributes to our understanding of the nature of diaspora tourism.

This research examines a contextual trigger, namely, choice architecture, which induces pro-environmental behavior among travelers. In particular, we test whether decision modes (choice vs. rejection) affect travelers’ preference for a sustainable hotel over a less sustainable one, and if yes, how moral hypocrisy mediates the link between decision modes and preference. Results of a series of five experimental studies show that choice decision mode has increased travelers’ preference for a pro-environmental hotel, which is mediated by different types of information processing (elaborate vs. deliberative processing), thereby refuting the potential alternative explanations (i.e., mood) of the findings. This article contributes to the literature by introducing a critical factor, namely, choice architecture, which significantly affects travelers’ preferences for pro-environmental hotels. The implications of the findings are discussed for both practitioners and researchers.

The purpose of this research was to provide a comprehensive analysis of the hidden intellectual structure of hospitality research. This study combined Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and text-net analysis (TNA) as the topic modeling approach for 7,931 articles with approximately 290,000 references in seven top-tier hospitality journals from 1960 to 2019. A total of 10 specific research topics were identified, with their probability timelines, in hospitality research. The results showed that hospitality research is focused on the empirical testing of relationships rather than theory building. A stakeholder research approach was identified, which includes the perspectives of management, employees, and customers. These findings contribute by revealing the hidden pattern of intellectual structures and research trends in hospitality research and overcoming the weaknesses of traditional co-citation analysis. Also, the study provides evidence of a shift from narrow to diverse research topics, thereby offering useful implications for hospitality practitioners.

The purpose of this research was to explore the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on consumers’ sustainable consumption behavior. It investigated whether the perceived threat of COVID-19 increased their intention to choose a sustainable hotel brand option. It examined whether environmental concern and the perceived value of patronizing a sustainable business mediated the relationship between the perceived threat of COVID-19 and sustainable behavioral intention. Five experimental studies indicated that the pandemic contributed to elevating sustainable behavioral intention. Environmental concern and the perceived value of patronizing a sustainable business played a mediating role in the relationship between the perceived threat of COVID-19 and sustainable behavioral intention. Another important outcome was that customers showed a preference for choosing a sustainable hotel brand over a non-sustainable brand, even when the price was higher.

This research assesses the effects of choice alternatives on the travel destination decisions of travelers. The decoy effect involves the addition of a new inferior alternative into a choice set, thereby increasing the choice of an existing option. Meanwhile, the compromise effect involves the addition of a new alternative into a choice set that increases selection of an existing option with nonextreme attributes, and decreases selection of options with extreme attributes. In this study, a series of scenario-based experiments is performed to determine if the decoy and compromise effects influence travel destination decisions. Results show that the decoy effect is stronger in a choice (vs. rejection) task, whereas the compromise effect is stronger in a rejection (vs. choice) task when deciding travel destinations.

This article explores consumer tendencies to opt for luxury or economy hotels by identifying their most and least important selection attributes. The researchers investigate how sociodemographic and behavioral characteristics influence traveler assessments of hotel attributes. In explaining consumer hotel selection preferences, the researchers used an unconditional method—best–worst scaling (BWS). Based on an analysis of responses from 397 luxury hotel customers and 351 economy hotel customers in the United States, it was found that the two groups perceive hotel attributes differently. Differentials were also identified on the basis of gender, income, and frequency of purchase. While acknowledging that the task is complex, there is an urgent need to identify the factors influencing hotel selection, because hoteliers need to attract new markets and also balance this by retaining existing patrons. The findings extend existing literature by applying BWS to the identification of hotel selection attributes.

A film contains an amalgamation of diverse features and provides audiences with a variety of reminiscent elements. Thus, this study aimed to identify the role of nostalgia in the involvement, familiarity, and behavioral intentions of potential film tourists. Thus, 610 respondents were selected to test a conceptual model explaining the role of nostalgia. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and structural equation modeling (SEM) were employed. Results indicated that, to some extent, nostalgia is an influential concept in explaining film tourism. The efficacy to explain the effects of nostalgia on involvement, familiarity, and behavioral intention showed relatively different. In particular, reminiscence of mimicking and desire to buy brand products were the most significant predictors in explaining other constructs, whereas the influence of the contents of the story on behavioral involvement was not significant.

Previous literature has focused on luxury tourism or luxury shopping, revealing that luxury-driven attitudes comprised unveiled reasons such as materialism, a desire for social status and the need to conform with others. Different outlets play different roles in the enactment of shopping attitudes, but even this has been scarcely researched within the context of tourism. This research combines these three areas of research in order to assess how materialism, the desire for status or to conform with others enact tourists’ intentions of buying luxuries while on holiday, within different outlets. A sample of 314 tourists in Hong Kong was used to test eight hypotheses, by means of an ordered probit model. The study’s findings enlighten the social nature of luxury tourists’ shopping behaviours, a nature that depends not only on what they buy but also largely on where they buy.

The performing arts are an integral part of the economies of many communities and often highlight the cultures of places visited. Because of this, studies on performing arts have been actively conducted in the arts management and marketing fields. Yet, little research has examined the benefits of the performing arts from a tourism perspective. Thus, the current study employed conjoint analysis in an attempt to identify the most preferred performing arts tourism products as perceived by Japanese tourists. Results revealed the most important determinant attributes Japanese tourists consider in purchasing a Korean performing arts product were ‘admission price’, followed by ‘type of theater’, ‘genre’, and ‘location of theater’. The most preferred performing arts tourism product was found to be the following: 5.517 (overall utility) = 1.081 (Korean pop music concert) + 2.233 (less than 5000 Yen) + 0.775 (downtown Seoul) + 1.428 (exclusive theater).

Since the 1990s, the Asia-Pacific region’s world market share of international travelers has increased, as America’s and Europe’s shares have fallen. China (People’s Republic of China) has become the world’s biggest tourism source market with an overseas spend of US$292 billion in 2015, fueling opportunities for the region and beyond. Now, Asia Pacific outbound travel is extending past short-haul interregional travel to long-haul destinations, specifically Europe. To realize this potential, European destinations need a better understanding of the Chinese traveler; their perceptions of destinations, awareness, and loyalty. This study measures the brand equity of Switzerland and Austria as perceived by Hong Kong Chinese tourists. Structural equation modeling results indicate that destination brand image and associations significantly impact brand loyalty, whereas destination awareness does not, contrary to past interregional research findings. Understanding the influence of brand components on overall brand equity supports the efficacy of the brand equity model for interregional destinations.

It has been suggested that there is a need to include variables other than traditional economic variables in models designed to assess visitors’ reactions to admission prices. This study explored the influence of selected behavioral and nontraditional economic factors in influencing visitors’ reactions. Analyses were undertaken on responses from five data sets that addressed pricing issues in the Texas state park system. Generally, the economic factors were more useful predictors than the behavioral factors. Especially useful were perceptions of value for the admission price and importance of admission price to a day visit. Ownership of an annual pass and level of loyalty were also useful predictors of price perceptions.