Procrastination of Travel: The Effect of Crowdedness

The tendency to postpone an action, otherwise known as procrastination, is related to the discounting of future costs. In a tourism context, despite having the best intentions to travel, people may procrastinate their trips. Considering crowding as a type of travel cost, this study examined the effects of crowdedness on travelers’ intentions to visit a theme park and their intended timing of the visit. The results of binomial logistic regression models reveal that crowdedness is negatively related to tourists’ theme park visit intention. More important, crowding is associated with people’s procrastination on their specific timing of visiting the theme park. By focusing on the effect of travel cost (i.e., crowding) on procrastination, this paper calls for more attention to procrastination in the travel and tourism industry and proposes procrastination as a different angle to look at the nontravel phenomenon.