Tourist scams: cues and processes in decision-making

Abstract

ABSTRACT Tourist scams have long been a challenge for tourist security and destination management. Understanding the tourist decision-making process can improve scam prevention. Through a quasi-experiment, 609 participants made, and documented reasons for, decisions after viewing animated scam videos. Thematic analysis was conducted to explore the external (operational) cues and internal (respondent-related) references, and revealed two categories of cues, namely scam-covering and scam-revealing cues. Three internal references—emotions, knowledge and needs—exerted a crucial impact. Multiple heuristics strategies were identified, and a model was made to illustrate the decision-making process. Theoretic and pragmatic implications are discussed for communicating scam detection.