Consumer Psychology of Tourism, Hospitality and Leisure

This volume focuses on consumer decision making for evaluating choice alternatives in tourism, leisure, and hospitality operations. It deals with research and methodological problems such as coping with nonlinear utility functions, capturing highly emotional product attributes, incorporating noncompensatory decision rules, and accounting for unobserved heterogeneity in a consumer population. The 21 research reports presented in this book are organized into 5 sections that address: tourist destinations, their struggle for competitive advantage and its measurement; tourist decision processes and the choice rules consumers exhibit in evaluating tourist products; the criteria for travel market segmentation; improvements in the methods that are instrumental in detecting or building tourist segments; and the tourist's consumption experience and the recent results in service quality and satisfaction monitoring. This book is an essential reference for researchers and practitioners in the areas of marketing, tourism, hospitality, and leisure. It contains a subject index.