194 Letter from Cláudia Seabra
Dear Junior Researchers,
Let me tell you something about paths, real life, readings, travel, research and the future – are you wondering how they can be connected?
My education, like my life, has always been a patchwork of different colours and textures. A bachelor’s degree in communication, a Master’s in social sciences, a doctorate in tourism and a post-doctorate in economic and social geography. However, amid so much diversity, one thing was constant, my interest in travel and people. I taught from an early age in very different areas: communication, services marketing and consumer behaviour, which led to me discovering my curiosity for studying and analysing the way in which consumers behave, especially when they buy one of the most desirable products: travel. Soon, I realized that my diverse background was very useful to study a such a complex phenomenon: travel for leisure.
In my MA studies I was still in love with the area of communication, so I chose to study how tourists use information sources to help them in their decision-making. In a time when social media was in its early stages, my study focused on how the sources of information consulted by tourists contributed to the creation of their expectations before travelling and how the situation in the destinations was still affected by the information previously consulted. After that, social media brought about a completely different set of circumstances in the way in which people (and especially students) communicated, so e-WOM communication and the phenomenon of prosuming were the next topics to be studied.
In the preparation of my classes for BA students, I read several seminal works of the most exciting era of the consumer behaviour research, the 80s and 90s. Reading the works of Um and Crompton (1990, 1992), it was clear to me that potential tourists create complex perceptions of travel and destinations in their decision-making processes, based on two different dimensions (Um & Crompton: 1990, 1992):
- Facilitators: attributes of the destination that tourists believe will help them satisfy their specific motivations;
- Inhibitors: attributes that are not congruent with their motivations and that may negatively influence their decision-making.
The facilitator factors are the most studied in tourism literature, especially travel motivations and destination image. Those were very important in shaping consumers’ behaviours, but were already well covered by past research (e.g. for motivations: Baloglu, 2000; Beard & Ragheb, 1983; Crompton, 1979; Dann, 1981; Fodness, 1994; Gnoth, 1997; Goossens, 2000; Iso-Ahola, 1982; Mansfeld, 1992; Pearce & Caltabiano, 1983; Ryan & Glendon, 1998; Yuan & McDonnald, 1990) (for destination image see Baloglu & Brinberg, 1997; Baloglu & McCleary, 1999; Chen & Tsai, 2007; Chon, 1990; Crompton & Ankomah, 1993). The inhibitor factors were less studied in the literature; specifically perceived risks were a neglected area in tourism