Consumer Reaction to Decelerated Tourism: Pace, Inherent Virtue, and Environmental Concern

Abstract

Timeflow has been identified as an important dimension of the real-time tourism experience. Based conceptually on the consumer acceleration/deceleration approach and the theory of virtue ethics, this research and its four subsequent studies use Bayesian methods to implicitly and explicitly to investigate the following: how consumers perceive pace and value, the connection between decelerated and conventional tourism with inherent virtue or vice, the positive feelings that decelerated tourism produces, and environmental concerns’ moderating role regarding predicting future tourism consumption behavior. The findings reveal that consumption pace is the core of the consumer experience. Decelerated tourism is perceived as virtuous and activate positive feelings. Strong (vs. weak) environmental concerns are considered a travel constraint and an indication of reduced revisit behavior. This research highlights consumption pace’s theoretical contribution and relevance, and offers marketing scholars and practitioners a tool that is useful for understanding consumers’ reactions to decelerated and fast experiential consumption.