Order Out of Chaos: Nudging Tourists’ Behaviours at a Time of Disruption?

A set of major disruptive political, socio-economic, technological, and ecological trends presents serious issues for tourism policy makers, regulators, and operators alike. In this turbulent context, how best to attempt to predict tourist behaviours? In tourism research the dominant rationalistic approach to decision-making does provide some useful insights across tourism choice. However, it seems increasingly less suited to the often relatively unplanned, hedonic, opportunistic, and impulsive decision-making that often characterises tourists’ behaviours on-site within a destination, and more generally to the behaviours of Generation Y and Generation Z. More generally, it is arguable that rational models of motivation and decision-making systematically underestimate the importance of affective processes in tourists’ behaviours. In this paper, we explore the implications of employing a much more naturalistic approach to decision-making at both the policy level and at the frontline of tourism operations.

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