Travel as a Life Priority?

This paper adopts a different approach to understand non- or infrequent travel. Most research is grounded in constraints theory, and assumes that once constraints are removed, people will travel. Yet, in spite of efforts by the industry to remove obstacles to participation, travel propensity rarely exceeds three-quarters of the population of developed economies. This paper tests the idea that tourism may simply not be a high enough priority for some people to engender travel, while for others it may be seen as being more important. The study evaluated where travel ranks within a set of 13 other activities. People who rated travel as being important or very important to them, consistently rated it as being a higher priority than most of the activities studied. Those who rated travel as being unimportant or of little importance placed it as a lower priority activity. The findings challenge the traditional constraints theory.