AMTP Proceedings 2026

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

Spring 2026

Abstract

Personas are widely used in tourism marketing, representing consumer segments through stable demographic, psychographic, and lifestyle profiles. While effective for communication and creative strategy, personas are limited in predicting specific behaviors. This research introduces experience appetites—derived from Fennell’s (1978) Perceived Product-Use Situation framework—as a complementary, behaviorally grounded extension. Whereas personas describe who the consumer is, experience appetites capture the motivational state activated within a particular decision context. Using data from repeat visitors to multiple destinations, we demonstrate substantial within-person variation in motives across trips, even to the same location. While persona categories alone failed to predict these shifts; appetite categories explained the behaviors. We propose a unified framework integrating identity and situational motivation, offering both theoretical advancement in tourism segmentation and practical guidance for improving behavioral prediction while preserving the empathic strengths of persona-based strategy.

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