Second, such openness means that the final behavioural pattern is imprinted with qualities of the environment within which the behaviour develops. What tourists seek is often initially vague and has a dynamic and shifting nature throughout an episode of tourism. This means the environment may exert considerable influence on expressed behaviour. This is not to say that tourist decisions and behaviours are entirely arbitrary or random. Rather the causal processes generating them are not only responsible for the overall experience, but also reconstruct the motives or intentional objectives of the tourism episode as the behavioural trajectory unfolds.
Third, this openness of much tourist behaviour and decision-making, combined with the role of the environment, suggests that most real time decisions will be experienced as intuitive, spontaneous or impulsive, since they would not have been clearly articulated or prefabricated in consciousness. That experience, however, is not evidence that judgments or decisions have not occurred. As an increasing body of work on human decision-making from an evolutionary perspective has revealed (Gigerenzer & Selten, 2002), ‘gut instincts’ have their own logic. Moreover, such very simple heuristics can generate behaviour that, in retrospect, appears surprisingly rational, complex and coherent.
To summarise, conventional consumer behaviour theories offer tourism policy makers and industry actors a constrained, albeit ‘fit for purpose’, picture of tourists’ decision-making. However, some deci- sion-making processes generate reasonably open itineraries or lead to the selection of activities as they are encountered. Hence, we contend that conventional models of tourist decision-making may lead to ineffective tourism policy, marketing and management practices.
Our intended contribution is in appraising substantive literature on tourists’ decision-making and in proposing an alternative approach for theorising about this phenomenon. We seek to address those qualities of tourist decision-making and behaviour that seem to have eluded existing models. More pragmatically, we offer an alternative theoretical base from which richly contextualised research concerning tourists’ decision-making can be developed. As an adjunct to conventional theorising, this should enable policy makers to develop better-in-formed policy, and industry actors to improve tourism marketing and management practices.
We next consider developments in the broader field of decision-making studies, many of which have focused on organisational decision-making. From this base we develop an argument for taking a naturalistic process perspective to tourist decision-making research, as we review the nature and contribution of recent research in tourist decision-making. We outline the strengths of taking a complex process view and conclude with some thoughts on the implications of this for research in tourists’ decision-making.