Effect of Time Pressure on Tourism: How to Make Non-Impulsive Tourists Spend More

Abstract

It is of commercial interest to stimulate non-impulsive consumers to spend more. Tourism provides a promising context to extend this research to the impulse buying of people who are non-impulsive in daily life. By utilizing two experiments and two post-trip surveys, this study reveals how the time pressure encountered in a tourism environment influences tourists’ impulse buying. The results show a special impact of time pressure in tourism settings, whereby time pressure significantly increases the impulse buying of the non-impulsive tourists; this effect is lacking for impulsive tourists. The rarity perception of current experience, activated implicitly rather than at a conscious level, leads non-impulsive consumers to engage in a rare behavior (i.e., impulse buying) through an unconscious link between perception and behavior. Conclusions reflect the particularity of tourism and provide guidance for practice after COVID-19.