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To augment the current literature on the memorable travel experience, this research attempts to elucidate the complex meaning of memorable travel experiences. It deploys a qualitative study to interview 17 participants in four study sites in the State of Indiana, US. From the personal interviews, this study discovers five thematic views entailing: (1) social interaction, (2) destination attractiveness, (3) excitement, (4) novelty, and (5) learning. Unlike most memorable travel experience studies in the existing literature which indicates knowledge as one of the components, this study finds that memorable travel experience involves in the learning process, not merely gaining knowledge. Relevance suggestions for future research are provided in the conclusion section.

Independent travelers are those vacationers who have booked only a minimum of their transportation and accommodation arrangements prior to departure on the vacation. Independent travel is an important and growing sector of worldwide tourism. Choice of vacation itinerary for the independent vacation represents a complex series of decisions regarding purchase of multiple leisure and tourism services. This chapter builds and tests a model of independent traveler decision-making for choice of vacation itinerary. The research undertaken employs a two-phase, inductive–deductive case study design. In the deductive phase, the researcher interviewed 20 travel parties vacationing in New Zealand for the first time. The researcher interviewed respondents at both the beginning and the end of their New Zealand vacations. The study compares pre-vacation research and plans, and actual vacation behaviors, on a case-by-case basis. The study examines case study narratives and quantitative measures of crucial variables. The study tests two competing models of independent traveler decision-making, using a pattern-matching procedure. This embedded research design results in high multi-source, multi-method validity for the supported model. The model of the Independent Vacation as Evolving Itinerary suggests that much of the vacation itinerary experienced in independent travel is indeed unplanned, and that a desire to experience the unplanned is a key hedonic motive for independent travel. Rather than following a fixed itinerary, the itinerary of an independent vacation evolves as the vacation proceeds. The independent traveler takes advantage of serendipitous opportunities to experience a number of locations, attractions and activities that they had neither actively researched nor planned.

This chapter aims to develop a holistic conceptual understanding of how tourism experiences are constructed, contextualized and packaged in the context of travel blogs. Tourist experiences are highlighted as an on-going process, continuously changing and altering during pre-, on-site-, and post-visit of tourist experiences. This chapter also examines the relationships between travel blog users’ motivation and engagement and tourist experience construction. As a result, a new dimension to the previous tourist experiences is offered.

Throughout history, the concept of luxury has had different emphases. It was scaling its existence in tourism, from the lifestyles of ancient kingdoms to the Roman empire's witnessing sightseeing trips, tourist attractions in townships to business tours and luxury hotels in Paris to the British phenomenon of ‘The Grand Tour’ and the ‘Golden Age of Travel’. The chapter also covers its spread across the small number of affluent societies and groups of wealthy consumers hailing from not only developed but developing economies in the early twentieth century.

Presently, the concept has become ‘mass’ as the Digital-First Millennial and Generation X, and also the affluent female market is all contributing to reshape the concept and the demand of luxury travel in the emerging scenario. Therefore, to understand it fully, it is imperative to review what has gone before and the influences of factors such as economic development, technological innovation and the consumption behaviour for luxury in different societies. Thus, the chapter is an attempt to understand the historical progression of luxury tourism for giving directions for future implications for the sustainable growth of this form of tourism across the globe and in India. The chapter concludes by noting the applied and social approaches in the development of luxury tourism, leaving many academic researchers and those in the tourism industry to resolve the real progression of luxury tourism and its development with the support of a cross-cultural perspective.

People have unconscious motives which affects their decision-making and associated behavior. The paper describes a study using thematic apperception test (TAT) to measure how unconscious motives influence travelers' interpretations and preferences toward alternative tours and hotels. Using the TAT, the present study explores the relationships between three unconscious needs: (1) achievement, (2) affiliation, and (3) power and preferences for four package tours (adventure, culture, business, and escape tours) and for seven hotel identities (quality, familiarity, location, price, friendliness, food and beverage, and cleanliness and aesthetics). The present study conducts canonical correlation analyses to examine the relationships between unconscious needs and preferences for package tours and hotel identities using data from 467 university students. The study scores 2,438 stories according to the TAT manual to identify unconscious needs. The findings indicate that (1) people with a high need for affiliation prefer an experience based on cultural values and hotels that are conveniently located, (2) individuals with a high need for power indicate a preference for high prices and good value for their money, and (3) people with a high need for achievement prefer a travel experience with adventure as a motivation. The study findings are consistent with previous research of McClelland (1990), Wilson (2002), and Woodside et al. (2008) in exploring impacts of the unconscious levels of human need.

Luxury branding, in the context of tangible luxury consumables, has received academic attention. But the notion remained inconclusive in the context of consumption of luxury intangibles. The travel setting provides an excellent backdrop to explore the complex cognitive process of assigning meaning to the relationship between travellers and luxury travel brands. The shifting image of luxury consumption from elitism to mass aspirational, too, needs to be studied for its transformative implications. The chapter focused on developing a brand relationship scale, namely, TraveLux, in the context of luxury travel consumption and tested its robustness to explain the shared sentiments and emotions of travellers, engaged in luxury travel, across social media. The chapter identifies a four construct instruments capturing the essence of immersive experience, ethnocultural acculturation, passion and excitement and self-congruence as a seedbed of luxury brand affinity for travellers. TraveLux was also found to capture the shared experience of travellers consuming luxury travel brands, thereby establishing a synch between the instrument constructs and manifested human cognition in real-life situations. The study expanded on the volume of literature pertaining to luxury branding in the context of product-oriented industry and addresses the existing void in understanding traveller–brand relationships in luxury travel contexts. The study implicates a theoretical change in branding concept in perceiving luxury brands as price-based exclusivity to a transformative cultural experience. Further extrapolations of the study could be made by incorporating subtle behavioural patterns of travellers in perceiving luxury and subsequent evocation and predisposition towards decision-making.

This paper provides a day-to-day analysis of the reliability of commuting time and trip scheduling under the Advanced Traveler Information System (ATIS). A simple network with parallel routes and bottleneck congestion is used to simulate the departure time and route choice decisions of commuters to minimize total travel time and scheduling delay cost. There are two major factors influencing the decisions of drivers in their departure time and route choices: their accumulated travel experience and information provided by ATIS. A simple experiment is carried for investigating trip-scheduling reliability of this network system.

The chapter aims to investigate the role and the impact of social media in influencing and shaping (new) tourism experiences.

A service dominant logic and co-creation approach and concepts was adopted for examining how the social media can influence interactions and participation that represent two major sources of tourism experiences.

The chapter provides several arguments showing how social media-enabled interactions and participation can facilitate, foster, and expand the experience co-creation process by altering: when, how, why, what, by whom, and how tourism experiences are co-created.

The chapter develops and argues a theoretical framework that needs to be further validated, refined, and expanded in various contexts.

The chapter provides several examples showing the practical implications on how tourists and tourism firms use the social media for enriching their interactions and participation in the co-creation of tourism experiences.

The chapter also illustrates how the social interactions supported and fostered by the social media can be used for influencing, shaping and promoting specific tourism experiences (i.e., sustainable tourism behavior, socially responsible tourism development).

Past research on technology enhanced tourism experiences has adopted a phenomenological approach to explaining experience creation. The chapter expands this literature by advocating the individualized and the socially co-constructed nature of tourism experiences as well as by adopting an intersubjective approach for explaining how the social media enable an iterative process among the tourists’ and their social context that in turn is responsible for the continuous formation of tourism experiences.

Solo travelling has been one of the rising types of travelling, especially after the pandemic. This study is focused on solo female travellers and aims to present a comprehensive literature review on solo travelling. For this aim, a detailed literature review is performed. The significance of this study lies in the recent developments in countries like Iran regarding women's rights, and it needs to be understood that women are powerful, and they can prove that by travelling solo. This study is aimed to contribute to women's empowerment because it is important to set various examples and pave the way for the next generations towards a more free, enlightened, conscious and modern future. As a segment, solo female travellers need to be characterised in terms of their demographics and motivations for solo travelling, and destinations should take precautions for their safety and security to be represented and promoted as a safe and modern location where the freedom of each individual is secured.