Formation of tourist behavioral intention and actual behavior

Abstract

The theory of planned behavior (TPB) has been used to examine behavior formation in a wide range of activities. Based on a comprehensive literature review, an extended TPB model of tourists was proposed to investigate the relations amongst constructs of the model with the addition of motivation and actual behavior. An instrument was developed based on previous tourism and marketing studies as well as focus groups. A two-wave data collection was implemented. Data were collected from 1,524 Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou residents in stage one and 311 respondents from the same cohort in stage two. Results of the study demonstrated that the proposed model with tourist motivation fit the data very well. However, the model integrated with both tourist motivation and actual behaviour was not tenable, which suggests that while TPB constructs predict behavioral intention, behavioral intention may not necessarily lead to actual tourist behavior.