How to Help Tourists Behave Better Abroad

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It’s been a bad year for tourism and a boom in the travel and hospitality sector would no doubt be good for the economy. However, it could also be a nightmare for people living and working amid the flux of transient tourists. It wasn’t that long ago that we saw media reports of tourist misbehaviour from carving names on ancient Egyptian bas reliefs to chasing geishas down the streets in Kyoto. Around the world, countries are looking for ways to curb bad behaviour from tourists. Iceland, for instance, launched the Inspired by Iceland pledge in June 2017 that urges tourists to travel responsibly. Apart from implementing official rules, a recent research study reveals that poor tourist behaviour could be reduced by simply making the tourists feel closer to the locals.

To illustrate the magnitude of opportunity, international tourist arrivals fell by 72 percent in January to October over the same period in 2019, translating into a loss of US$935 billion – more than 10 times the loss the industry suffered during the 2009 global financial crisis. The hospitality and tourism industry are hoping for “revenge travel” to take place, a riff on the concept of “revenge spending” that describes shopping starved consumers overcompensating by splurging when the pandemic is over. But how can places that seek to cash in on the return of tourist dollars do so while avoiding a return to the old days of bad tourist behaviour?

This is the subject of a paper titled “Tourist Misbehaviour: Psychological Closeness to Fellow Consumer and Informal Social Control”. The study is the first to examine the psychological closeness between locals and tourists and how this “psychological distance” affects tourists’ intention to misbehave. It was conducted by Lisa Wan, Associate Professor at the School of Hotel and Tourism Management and Department of Marketing at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School and her co-authors Prof. Michael Hui at University of Macau and Yao Qiu at CUHK Business School.

Psychological closeness refers to one’s feelings of attachment and connection towards other people. We tend to feel psychologically closer to someone whom we perceive as “one of us”. People who belong to the same social group are likely to follow the same set of social or cultural norms because they care about the consequences of their behaviour due to the need for approval and belongingness. In-group members are also likely to impose informal social control on fellow members, such as showing angry looks or sharing comments on those who violate the social norms to reinforce the order of the group. However, the same social practice does not usually apply to out-group members.

In the tourism context, Prof. Wan and her co-authors explain that when people are travelling abroad, they feel less connected to locals than they would at home. In other words, tourists feel psychologically distant from locals. Since they do not perceive themselves as belong to the same “group”, it is less likely for them to comply with local norms because they are less concerned about the consequences of their behaviour and they do not expect their actions to invoke informal social control from locals. Locals, on the other hand, consider tourists as outsiders and therefore may not always voice out their disapproval of tourist bad behaviour.