Though most long‐haul Chinese travellers participate in group‐based tours, many young Chinese are now travelling overseas to acquire educational qualifications. These ‘study tourists’ travel independently around their place of study, often accompanied by friends and relatives whom they are hosting. Understanding the characteristics of such independent behaviours may offer insights into China's future outbound travel market. This study of 1400 Chinese studying in Australia highlights distinctions between independent student travellers and youth travellers more generally such as backpackers. The findings challenge established typologies of independent youth travellers and raise prospective implications for marketers. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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PurposeThis review aims to discuss concepts and theories from cognitive psychology, identifies tourism studies applying them and discusses key areas for future research. The paper aims to demonstrate the usefulness of cognitive psychology for understanding why tourists and particularly pleasure travellers demonstrate the behaviour they exhibit. Design/methodology/approachThe paper reviews 165 papers from the cognitive psychology and literature regarding pleasure travel related to consciousness, mindfulness, flow, retrospection, prospection, attention, schema and memory, feelings and emotions. The papers are chosen to demonstrate the state of the art of the literature and provide guidance on how these concepts are vital for further research. FindingsThe paper demonstrates that research has favoured a behaviourist rather than cognitive approach to the study of hedonic travel. Cognitive psychology can help to understand the mental processes connecting perception of stimuli with behaviour. Numerous examples are provided: top-down and bottom-up attention processes help to understand advertising effectiveness, theories of consciousness and memory processes help to distinguish between lived and recalled experience, cognitive appraisal theory predicts the emotion elicited based on a small number of appraisal dimensions such as surprise and goals, knowledge of the mental organisation of autobiographical memory and schema support understanding of destination image formation and change and the effect of storytelling on decision-making, reconstructive bias in prospection or retrospection about a holiday inform the study of pleasurable experience. These findings indicate need for further cognitive psychology research in tourism generally and studies of holiday travel experiences. Research limitations/implicationsThis review is limited to cognitive psychology and excludes psychoanalytic studies. Practical implicationsCognitive psychology provides insight into key areas of practical importance. In general, the use of a cognitive approach allows further understanding of leisure tourists’ behaviour. The concept of attention is vital to understand destination advertising effectiveness, biases in memory process help to understand visitor satisfaction and experience design and so on. Use of cognitive psychology theory will lead to better practical outcomes for tourists seeking pleasurable experiences and destination managers. Originality valueThis is the first review that examines the application of concepts from cognitive psychology to the study of leisure tourism in particular. The concepts studied are also applicable to study of travellers generally.

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This study adopts a generational perspective to understand the shift in domestic and international travel motivations of Australians. In consideration of the largest and most dominant travel consumers at present, the Baby Boomer, Generation X and Generation Y cohorts, the study reveals significant differences between the cohorts’ value perceptions, attitude and intention associated with domestic holidays. However, the findings revealed no significant differences between the cohorts in Australians’ value perceptions and attitude towards international holidays. The study offers important insights for destination marketers seeking ways to address changes in tourism demand from a generational perspective, particularly those seeking to target the Australian tourism market.

An understanding of generational shifts in tourist behavior facilitates the effective prediction and accommodation of future tourism trends. Such predictions are important if the Asia-Pacific region is to reach its tourism potential. This study investigates the domestic travel motivations of 632 Australian Baby Boomer, Generation X, and Generation Y travelers to uncover each generational cohort's travel mindset. Specifically, it considers how the sociohistorical environment when its members "came of age" during adolescence (i.e., thus creating a generation), create a unique lifelong perspective that influences both current and future tourist behavior. Although the survey results show that the travel decision-making process is similar across cohorts, model comparisons reveal generational differences. This study advances the theoretical understanding of the implications of generational perspectives on future travel behavior and provides foresight into demand factors that will drive future travel growth in the Asia-Pacific region and particularly growth in domestic leisure travel by Australians.

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Sustainable tourism quality control tools (QCTs) are voluntary mechanisms that translate sustainable tourism concepts into practice. While essential to sustainable tourism practice, the most recent depiction of their diversity occurred in the early 2000s and identified just four types and one variability parameter. Reviewing and synthesizing the extant literature, this study identifies 15 types of QCTs, each possessing numerous variations, and seven critical variability parameters. Together these constitute the new “QCT multiverse.” This contemporary perspective on QCT diversity facilitates engagement with sustainable tourism by indicating the more comprehensive array of practices available for destination practitioners and managers.