This paper presents the results of a review of the literature concerning post-disaster and post-crisis recovery for tourist destinations. A total of 64 articles on this topic published in peer-reviewed tourism journals between January 2000 and June 2012 were included in the review. These articles were written on a number of different disaster contexts, including weather-related events (floods and hurricanes), natural disasters (earthquakes and tsunami) and other events (such as pandemics and terrorist attacks).The key themes that emerged included a lack of communication between stakeholders, media sensationalism, the importance of selecting the most effective marketing messages, lack of disaster-management plans, damage to destination image and reputation, and the changes in tourist behaviour following crises and disasters. The review identifies ways to improve the speed and effectiveness of response to disaster, the importance of relationship marketing with loyal customers and the need to quickly repair destination image. Suggestions for future research arising from this review include the urgent need to encourage tourism operators to engage with crisis preparedness and disaster-management strategies and the importance of gaining a better understanding of the consumer response to disastrous events.

Two imagery-evoking strategies are examined to determine their effectiveness in producing an elaborate consumption vision. Specifically, a 3 × 3 factorial experimental design is employed to examine the effects of pictures and text as advertising stimuli to evoke elaborate consumption visions among the participants within the context of holiday decision making. A MANOVA revealed a main effect for each of the two stimuli. The presence of more concrete pictures contributed to the extent of elaboration and the quality of consumers' consumption visions. Furthermore, the addition of concrete words together with instructions to imagine increased the elaboration and quality of the consumption vision. A significant interaction effect between the picture and text variables demonstrated that combining instructions to imagine with concrete pictures is the most efficacious strategy. The article discusses the implications of the findings for theory as well as offering an application of the results for tourism destination marketers.

This study provides an assessment of methods used in existing tourism research to measure emotion and discusses the potential for use of psychophysiological methods such as electro-dermal analysis, facial muscle activity, heart rate response, eye tracking system and vascular measures. Psychophysiological measurement techniques have been reported in the marketing, advertising and media literature; however, to the best knowledge of the authors, no studies are reported in the tourism literature. Instead, studies of emotion in the tourism literature invariably employ self-report questionnaire methods which capture only tourists' high-order emotions and are subject to a variety of forms of bias. Unconscious emotional responses that can provide unbiased portrayal of individuals' initial emotional reactions when exposed to a stimulus have been largely ignored. The paper concludes that studies combining both self-report and psychophysiological measures are needed and areas for future research are discussed.

Although an objective and increasingly common technique in marketing, media and psychology, psycho-physiological measures are rarely used in tourism research to detect tourism consumers' spontaneous emotional responses. This study examines the use of psycho-physiological measures in tourism and in particular explores the usefulness of skin conductance and facial electromyography methods in tracking emotional responses to destination advertisements. Thirty-three participants were exposed to three destination advertisements while their self-report ratings, real-time skin conductance and facial electromyography data as well as post hoc interview data were obtained. The results demonstrate that, compared with self-report measures, psychophysiological measures are able to better distinguish between different destination advertisements, and between different dimensions of emotion. Participants' affective experience reported in post hoc interviews was found to be consistent with emotional peaks identified from continuous facial electromyography and skin conductance monitoring. These results validate the ability of psychophysiological techniques to capture moment-to-moment emotional responses and it is concluded that psycho-physiological methods are useful in measuring emotional responses to tourism advertising. Methodological insights regarding the constraints associated with the use and application of psychophysiological methods are discussed.

To date, limited research has investigated the effects of tourist prior knowledge as a multidimensional construct on their perceived risk. This research is one of the first studies to investigate the relationships among tourists’ risk perceptions and various types of their prior knowledge, namely subjective knowledge, objective knowledge, prior visitation, and past international travel experience. The research also investigates the nature of the relationship between tourist prior knowledge, risk perceptions, and their subsequent information search behavior. Using structural equation modeling, the results reveal that while objective knowledge did not significantly reduce or increase the risk associated with traveling to the Middle East, subjective knowledge appeared to have the strongest influence on tourist risk perceptions. The results of this study further suggest that while various dimensions of perceived risk may elicit the use of different information sources, prior knowledge also plays a role alongside risk perceptions in determining the information sources used. Implications at both theoretical and practical levels are also discussed.