The use of smartphones has empowered tourists to make travel decisions while at a destination. The purpose of this paper is to explore how tourists use metaheuristics to achieve a near-optimal solution for onsite decisions mediated by smartphones. An event-based narrative inquiry technique with semi-structured interviews was used to collect the data. The findings identify two types of decision contexts based on temporal and geographic distance to direct experience/consumption. The findings also reveal that tourists use serial heuristics for a near-optimal solution under different decision contexts, and this solution is achieved through three steps of a tourist decision journey including the initialization solution, acceptance and selection, and final decision. These heuristics can be consciously deployed or unconsciously triggered. The findings offer marketing managers direction regarding what to emphasize when delivering marketing stimuli in onsite destination decision-making contexts.
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