TOURIST BEHAVIOUR AND EXPERIENCE: A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Keywords:
tourist behaviour, tourist experience, co-creation, sustainabilityAbstract
This review examines the contemporary literature on tourist behaviour and tourist experience to clarify how these two closely related domains have evolved within tourism research and to identify key directions for future scholarship. The article adopts a thematic review approach. It synthesises major conceptual, theoretical, and topical developments in the literature, with particular attention to the relationship between tourist actions, decision processes, and lived experiences across the tourist journey. The review shows that research on tourist behaviour has largely focused on motivations, preferences, decision-making, destination choice, risk perception, sustainable conduct, and post-travel outcomes such as loyalty and word-of-mouth. In contrast, tourist experience research has emphasised emotional, sensory, memorable, authentic, co-created, and technology-mediated dimensions of travel. Although both streams offer valuable insights, they remain insufficiently integrated. The review identifies major gaps in the literature, including the limited connection between behaviour-focused and experience-focused research, the dominance of static and cross-sectional perspectives, the underrepresentation of diverse tourist groups and non-Western contexts, and the need for stronger engagement with sustainability, ethics, and technological transformation. The article contributes to tourism scholarship by bringing tourist behaviour and tourist experience into a single analytical frame. It argues for more integrative, process-based, and future-oriented frameworks that capture tourism as a dynamic sequence of anticipation, action, interaction, interpretation, and post-travel response.
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