Option framing for upselling tourism services: Does cognitive availability prevent irrational choices?

Verônica Feder Mayer, Glauber Eduardo de Oliveira Santos and Osiris Ricardo Bezerra Marques
Additional contact information
Verônica Feder Mayer: 28110Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Brazil
Glauber Eduardo de Oliveira Santos: 28133University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil
Osiris Ricardo Bezerra Marques: 28110Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Brazil

Tourism Economics, 2022, vol. 28, issue 2, 476-494

Abstract: This article examines the effect of option framing and cognitive load on consumer choices of tourism services. Previous literature has shown that consumers tend to choose more options and spend more money when they begin the choice process from a complete set of options (downgrade/delete framing) than when they start choosing from a more basic set of options (upgrade/add framing). To exam this irrational behavior, we conducted two experimental studies with 561 consumers of leisure travel. The results of the two experiments provided robust evidence on the effect of the downgrade framing strategy on upselling tourism services and revealed that cognitive availability did not prevent consumers from making irrational choices. These findings indicate that decisions involving leisure trips may be even more susceptible than previously thought to cognitive biases and contextual influences due to their emotional and hedonic aspects, extending the existing literature on behavioral economics in tourism.

Keywords: behavioral economics; cognitive load; consumer behavior; decision process; option framing; upselling tourism services (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1354816620949722 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:toueco:v:28:y:2022:i:2:p:476-494

DOI: 10.1177/1354816620949722

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Tourism Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().