Title: Behavioural pricing opportunities in tourism destinations: a collaborative approach

Authors: Henri Kuokkanen

Addresses: Glion Graduate School, Glion Institute of Higher Education, Rue de l'Ondine 20, 1630 Bulle, Switzerland

Abstract: This paper proposes collaborative behavioural pricing strategies to attract additional demand and revenue to a tourism destination. Unlike previous work, it emphasises opportunities to cooperate across tourism-linked businesses not owned by the same entity. Prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) suggests that every spending decision creates disutility to a consumer, but that the marginal disutility of consumption decreases as the expenditure increases. Thus cross-business packages offered in a destination can lead to two types of benefits. First, they increase total visitor expenditure even when additional discounts are offered. Second, with pre-purchase of in-destination services, visitors face fewer spending decisions on arrival, and the resulting reduction in disutility increases their willingness to commit to additional spending. The proposed framework temporally divides visitor spending behaviour before and during the visit to analyse the potential benefits of collaboration. The model is illustrated by a numerical example and future research avenues for testing the framework are outlined.

Keywords: behavioural pricing; collaboration; demand creation; destination management; mental accounting; prospect theory; revenue management; visitor spending behaviour; pricing opportunities; tourism industry; tourist destinations; visitor expenditure.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRM.2016.077020

International Journal of Revenue Management, 2016 Vol.9 No.2/3, pp.186 - 200

Received: 02 Jul 2015
Accepted: 13 Jan 2016
Published online: 17 Jun 2016 *

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