Multi-faceted tourist travel decisions: A constraint-based conceptual framework to describe tourists' sequential choices of travel components

Assume that tourists' travel choices can be regarded as the outcome of a sequential scheduling process in which a number of decisions are scheduled over a longer period (e.g. varying from a few days to several months) and that those decisions take into account restrictions because of time and money budgets and coupling constraints caused by work, family and friendship-based relationships. Then, the specific contribution of this paper is to introduce a conceptual framework that allows one to analyze tourists' travel behavior that incorporates this type of temporal sequencing of multi-faceted travel decisions as well as relevant decision-making constraints. In line with most research on travel choice, our discussion will be restricted to holiday travel only. It should also be noted that though our analysis allows us to look at multiple facets within the trip choice, we focus on tourists' choices of single trips. Thus, we leave the extension of the proposed framework to include choices of multiple trips over longer periods of time for future research.