Abstract
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.
Highlights
Travel decisions are multilayered decisions with interdependent elements that “evolve in a decision process over time” (Dellaert, Ettema, and Lindh 1998, 313)
Choosing a destination is a complex process where only the result is visible in the form of tourist flows from a source market to a destination
The first part concentrates on the. entirety of destinations and links between destinations in one destination choice (DC) section to investigate the structure of alternative destination evaluations, relevance of destinations and differences between the investigated sections of DC
Summary
Travel decisions are multilayered decisions with interdependent elements (e.g. destination, type of accommodation) that “evolve in a decision process over time” (Dellaert, Ettema, and Lindh 1998, 313). A type of travel decision that receives special attention in tourism research is the choice of a destination, probably due to the high importance for tourists compared to other elements of the travel decision (Fesenmaier and Jeng 2000; Oppewal, Huybers, and Crouch 2015). Choosing a destination is a complex process where only the result is visible in the form of tourist flows from a source market to a destination. Until a destination is chosen by a tourist it has to successfully complete RESEARCH PAPER. 112-130 several stages of the destination choice (DC) process. The reasons it is preferred to other alternative destinations during these steps are manifold, interrelated and depend on external as well as internal factors (Um and Crompton 1990)
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