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Many studies on risk and destination choice focus on specific destinations or tourist characteristics in an isolated way, resulting in a fragmented nature in research results without a comprehensive understanding. Therefore, an integrated research approach is applied using tourists’ self-assessments of risk and uncertainty in travel decision-making, as well as key characteristics of destinations at hypothetical and realistic stages of the destination choice process. The study uses data collected from a survey on German tourists’ destination choice behavior. The results show that high educational levels and high travel frequencies are distinct characteristics of risk-affine tourists, while higher age groups are more dominant in risk- and uncertainty-averse tourist types. Tourists with varying attitudes toward risk and uncertainty in travel decision-making differ strongly with respect to ideal destinations initially, but choose rather similar destinations when it comes to the final destination choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the relation between terrorism and tourism has been an important topic for tourism research, the questions whether terrorism affects tourism immediately and how long after a terrorism event tourism recovers are, as yet, not clearly answered. The aim of this article is to better understand the magnitude and temporal scale of the impact of terrorism on tourism. To this end, a research model differentiating between short-term and long-term effects of terrorism on tourism is developed and analyzed for the destination Israel using data on tourists from Germany. The results show both short-term and long-term impacts with a time lag between the terrorist event and the beginning of tourism decline of 1 or up to 6 months. An economic influence on the development of tourist arrivals was not detected, but seasonality plays an important role in the relationship between terrorism and tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Safety and security are key aspects for the success of tourism in every destination. Rather than objective risks, it is rather the tourist's individual and subjective perception of these risks that mostly influence destination choice and in the long run tourism flows from one country to another. The concept of risk perception has been highly studied in tourism, however the literature remains fragmented resulting in lack of a cohesive and comprehensive framework. It is not yet clear how risk perception as one important determinant of destination choice acts as an influencing factor in the destination choice process. The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesise literature from tourism research and other disciplines on risk and particularly risk perception to develop a framework that offers a better understanding of the role of risk (perception) in the destination choice process. Although travel decision-making and destination choice is a negotiation process between tourist needs and destination offer, most past research has mainly concentrated on the tourist rather than the specific attributes of a destination. The aim is therefore to develop a literature-based framework, including tourist and destination attributes, which is built upon a meta-review of fundamental and recent studies from various disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A better understanding of the complex destination choice process is highly relevant, both for academia and practice. Tourism research tends to focus either on actually executed or hypothetical destination choices. However, a discrepancy exists between these two types of destination choices which has hardly been investigated. Moreover, past research often studies tourists and their attitudes, needs or perceptions of destinations but not how destinations' attributes affect destination choices. To approach these two research gaps, this study concentrates not only on actual but also on hypothetical destination choices to better understand differences in the evaluation of alternative destinations. This study furthermore examines the role of the destination itself to discover the influence of destination characteristics on destination choices. Therefore, network analysis and set theory are combined in a new research approach which allows to analyse destination choices with varying closeness to reality whilst preserving destination information. The analysis is based on a quantitative survey of German tourists' travel decision-making behaviour. The results reveal changes in destination choices from multidimensional hypothetical choices to unidimensional actual and past choices. Furthermore, only few destinations have a consistent position whilst most destinations are either more relevant for hypothetical or actual destination choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractFood consumption represents a substantial share of tourism’s global CO2 emissions. Yet, experimental research on reducing high-emission food choices among tourists is scarce. This study explores how cognitive and behavioural interventions affect the likelihood of choosing vegetarian dishes in hotel restaurants. The authors conducted covert field experiments using theory-informed menu designs to encourage vegetarian food choices. In two hotels, 647 participants received one of four menu conditions: the hotel’s default menu or one of three intervention menus. The intervention menus were designed to test cognitive (using the bandwagon effect) or behavioural interventions (using framing and anchoring biases). The results show that the behavioural interventions outperformed the cognitive intervention in increasing vegetarian orders. When presented with the behavioural intervention, participants had up to 654% (95% CI [2.21, 49.80]) higher odds of choosing vegetarian dishes than the cognitive intervention group. The odds increased to 950% (95% CI [1.26, 27.35]) when the participants were presented with a framing and anchoring-based behavioural intervention. The results indicate that behavioural interventions are more effective in encouraging pro-environmental food choices in hotel settings than cognitive interventions. This study contributes to the literature on pro-environmental behaviour change, presenting suggestions for further studies and practical, theoretical, and managerial implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]