ABSTRACT
Tourism marketing is all about tourists. The effects of marketing on tourists start well before the trip, and fi nish long after, if they end at all. A tourist displays a particular behaviour when purchasing tourism products. First of all, the acquisition of services takes place prior to their consumption. Such a lag between the act of acquisition and consumption can be typifi ed by the fact that a given journey begins long before the act of boarding a plane to reach a certain holiday location. Far from their own domestic environment, the tourist becomes emotionally fragile and to alleviate this they search for more information about destination features. Even when the holiday time is over, the consumption of the tourism product may not have been completed, in the sense that registered emotions are captured and ‘frozen’ by photos and fi lms, to be shared with relatives and friends. Finally, the decision-making is also constrained by the diffi culty of having full information prior to the consumption of tourism products; this constraint arises on information sources available and cognitive processing limitations (Correia 2002). These effects have to be measured throughout the tourist decision-making process.
