Behavioural pricing effects in tourism: A review of the empirical evidence and its managerial implications

Abstract

During recent decades, behavioural pricing research has accumulated to represent an expansive subset of pricing research addressing how humans perceive, process, and evaluate price information. However, the insights and managerial implications of behavioural pricing research are still fragmented and hardly prepared for specific fields of application. This article provides an integrative review of the effects of behavioural pricing in the tourism field. Taking an application-oriented perspective, we propose a framework for describing how price perceptions may be influenced by (1) the presentation of prices, (2) the presentation of the choice set, (3) the communication accompanying the price, and (4) the design of payment parameters. We use this framework to structure and synthesize the empirical evidence on the effects of behavioural pricing in the tourism context. Our search for papers considering behavioural pricing effects that included either or both the terms tourism and travel in both the tourism and marketing literature identified 100 articles from the period between 1995 and 2022. The findings should provide a more comprehensive understanding of how behavioural pricing can be applied in tourism practice. Besides managerial implications, we discuss unresolved issues and offer an agenda for further empirical research on behavioural pricing in the tourism context.