The role of novelty in the pleasure travel experience

Despite an extensive literature on novelty-seeking and the intuitive appeal of vacation behavior as a setting for its observation, the significance of a pleasure trip that is familiar or "commonplace " as opposed to one that is "novel " has not been investigated. The purpose of this study is to describe novel versus commonplace trips and to explore behavioral and demographic differences between travelers who experience different levels of novelty. Pleasure trips are taken in anticipation of a set of benefits that apparently vary among individuals. For example, some travelers select trips that involve only minor behavioral changes from their daily routine; others opt for more radical activities such as above normal expenditures, exposure to unfamiliar environ-ments and new social contacts. Although some of this variation is certainly due to individual differences, the variability among the activities people describe as plea