Prospection and tourism

Authors/Creators

Dung Le
Noel Scott, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow

Abstract

When making decisions about their future dream holidays, tourists often spend significant time thinking about future scenarios. This is an example of ‘mental time travel’, a process called prospection. The concept of prospection refers to human ability of ‘pre-experience’ the future and hence how that future ‘feels’, which is why it is sometimes called affective forecasting. There is a large volume of psychological research on prospection, but in applied fields, the use of various terms makes the current literature complex, disconnected and hard to navigate. This chapter provides an introduction to prospection as an underlying mechanism explaining some of the effects of experiential marketing. It discusses tourism prospection-related terms, errors of prospection and mental biases and ways to better manage tourist experiences.

Document Type

Journal Article

Date of Publication

6-24-2024

Volume

27

Publication Title

Tourism Social Science Series

Publisher

Emerald

School

School of Arts and Humanities

Comments

Le, D. and Scott, N. (2024), "Prospection and Tourism", Cognitive Psychology and Tourism (Tourism Social Science Series, Vol. 27), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 153-161. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1571-504320240000027013

Copyright

Subsciption content

First Page

153

Last Page

161