Handbook of tourist behavior

In today's highly competitive and global economy, understanding tourist behaviour is imperative to success. Understanding tourists/travellers is even more important as they appear to be still more demanding and changeable, and to show complex preference structures and decision patterns. In brief, tourist behaviour has become a cornerstone of any marketing strategy and action. Choosing, buying and consuming tourism/travel products and services includes a range of psycho-social processes and a number of personal and environmental influences that researchers and managers should take into account. This book aims at providing an overview of such processes and influences, and at explaining the basic concepts and theories that underlie tourist decision making and behaviour. It also incorporates a number of cases studies in order to aid readers to better appraise the application of those concepts and theories. The Handbook of Tourist Behavior will be of significant interest to researchers and students in tourism, leisure, marketing and psychology, and also to practitioners in the tourism industry.