Travel decision-making and travel constraint negotiation strategies

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The tourism industry is one of the fastest growing industries in terms of economic impact and tourist arrivals with over 1.8 billion tourist arrivals worldwide. With tourism being an open system, the tourism industry is strongly affected by external factors such as terrorism. Rather than ceasing to travel in an increasingly risk prone world, people decide to travel to different places, at a different time or in a different manner. These changes in tourists’ travel decision-making behaviour, obvious in global tourist flows, can be explained by constraint negotiation where people overcome travel barriers to travel despite a constraining factor. Past studies on travel decision-making following leisure constraint theory, however, often focus on how various factors (e.g. safety and security risks, financial restrictions) influence the decision IF someone travels rather than concentrating on WHEN, HOW and WHERE someone travels when facing travel constraints. This research project addresses these issues and builds on the knowledge from the Tourism Cluster at University of Queensland and the Department of Geography at LMU University of Munich on risk perception, destination choice processes and travel behaviour to gain a better understanding of travel constraint negotiation strategies and their impact on travel decision-making behaviour. By developing and empirically testing a research model that integrates spatial and temporal elements, this research project deals with the question how tourists overcome several types of travel constraints through the formation of adequate constraint negotiation strategies for each type of travel constraint. Influencing factors both from a destination and tourist perspective will be evolved from past literature and qualitative interviews and then tested in quantitative surveys on actual travel decision-making. Based on the results from the quantitative survey, psychophysiological experiments with hypothetical choices will be conducted to investigate how communication of travel constraints can impact travel decision-making. The combination of these approaches allows to specifically address the existing discrepancy between actual and hypothetical choice behaviour. By conducting the quantitative survey first in Australia and then in Germany, after integrating the results from the experiments, this research project can reach conclusions with a generalisability going beyond case study approaches. This research design, furthermore, provides an opportunity to add a stronger geographic perspective to tourism research by integrating spatial explanatory variables such as spatial proximity or familiarity with certain types of risk. The novel measures to identify influencing factors of travel decision-making and travel constraint perception such as psychophysiological methods can help to explain constraint negotiation and to develop constraint negotiation strategies with affective and cognitive elements.