The development of multidestination models is an important area of tourism research in which a very limited number of studies have been published. As was made clear in Lue, Crompton, and Stewart (LCS) (1996) a key concept in this literature is that of cumulative attractivity. Unfortunately, it appears that this concept was inadequately operationalized and therefore a number of inappropriate conclusions were drawn. This commentary challenges three aspects of the research reported in LCS, with the intent of stimulating further research is this area. Specifically, the three issues are: (1) the concept of cumulative attraction was not adequately operationalized; (2) the experimental design was inadequate to address the goal of the research; and (3) the interpretation of results is problematic due to the scaling clamping and the lack of recognizing individual differences.
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