ABSTRACT
This paper presents how knowledge of tourist behavior plays an important role in tourism planning and marketing activities for tourism business managers. It analyzes the role of tourist consumer behavior and tourist typologies in globalization era. In addition, discussions on how knowledge of tourist consumer behavior can be useful in developing, promoting and selling tourism products are presented.
INTRODUCTION
Answering whether knowledge about tourists’ behavior is useful for practicing managers of tourism industries would involve a consideration of various important issues regarding current tourism trends. In general, tourism can be defined in behavioral terms as persons who travel away from their normal residential region for a temporary period of at least one night. Their behavior involves a search for leisure experiences from interactions with features or characteristics of places they choose to visit (Leiper, 1997). Referring the Leiper’s statement, it can be confirmed that understanding tourist consumer behavior is not merely of academic interest but doing so would provide knowledge for effective tourism planning and marketing. Although some writers (e.g. Meethan, 2001; Jelincic, 1999) consider that under- standing the behavior of tourism consumers is less important in the globalization era since tourists tend to have very similar traveling habits, Douglas and Wind (1987) and Kean (2003) insist that the world