“How Come You Are Here?” Considering the Context in Research on Travel Decisions

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Travel decision research still struggles to explain a large portion of the variance in travel choices. We argue that advances in this domain must originate from a shift in the kinds of questions we ask travelers to understand what triggers their decisions. The proposed shift from “Why did you . . . ?” to “How come . . . ?” changes the emphasis from retrospective sense giving to a contextual understanding of travel choice, focusing in particular on the constellations that produce actual travel behavior. This shift opens research avenues of a new theoretical and methodological nature and has fundamental implications for consumer research as well as destination marketing practices.