An Extension of the Theory of Planned Behavior Model for Tourists

The sufficiency of theory of planned behavior (TPB) is still being questioned although the model was validated in predicting a wide range of intentions and behaviors. Based on a comprehensive literature review, an extended TPB model of tourists was proposed to investigate relations among constructs of the model with the addition of motivation and actual behavior. An instrument was developed based on previous tourism and marketing studies as well as focus groups. A two-wave data collection was implemented, with data collected from 1,524 Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou residents in Stage 1 and 311 respondents from the same cohort in Stage 2. Results of the study demonstrated that the extended TPB model with tourist motivation fit the data relatively well, explaining 5% more of the variation in behavioral intention in comparison with a base model without motivation. However, the model with both tourist motivation and actual behavior was not tenable, despite a marginal relationship found between behavioral intention and actual tourist behavior using regression analysis. The findings warrant further research examining the predictive power of behavioral intention on actual behavior.