Unplanned Tourist Attraction Visits by Travellers

A conceptual model of travellers' unplanned attraction visits is proposed based upon the literature related to intention-behaviour discrepancy and prospect theory and a survey of 551 travellers was used to test the proposed model. The results of the study indicate that unplanned en route decisions are significant parts of travel in terms of the number of attractions visited and the length of stay. Also, trip and traveller characteristics have a significant indirect effect on the number of unplanned attraction visits made. The results focus attention on the importance of on-site stimuli that can be used to evoke unplanned stops.