Author: Li-Yu Lee 李梨瑜

Introduction       Although the classic marketing idiom says that marketing is “the battle for your mind” (Ries and Trout, 1981), research on tourist personality in relation to travel preferences is quite limited. According to Leung & Law (2010), there are 169 research articles on personality covering a broad range of topics from human personality to brand personality. However, in the human personality area, the majority of topics focus on service staff. Current research on tourist personality is insufficient.       Most reports on tourist behavior are typological. The classifications are relatively arbitrary without supportive data. For example, Cohen (1972), a frequently cited sociological paper on tourism, points that people travel to seek novelty and strangeness. Therefore, the experience of tourism is a combination of degrees of novelty and familiarity, “the security of old habits with the excitement of change.” Based on the degrees that tourists keep in their “microenvironment bubbles,” he classified tourists into four groups: the organized mass tourist, the individual mass tourist, the explorer, and the drifter.       The other famous theory on tourist behavior is by Stanley Plog (1973 & 2004). In the 1960’s when commercial flights just launched, airline companies saw