Senior outdoor tourists’ injuries, illnesses & infirmities: Reveal or conceal?

Tourism enterprises balance commercial opportunities from older clients, against costs of adapting to greater health and safety risks. We use prospect theory to analyse when and why senior outdoor tourists reveal or conceal injuries, illnesses or infirmities, using actual health and safety incidents from 3012 tourists on 166 tours in 30 countries, and 1716 tourists on 122 repetitions of a single tour. Senior outdoor tourists’ communications of health information demonstrate all four key components of prospect theory: reference dependence, loss aversion, diminishing sensitivity, and probability weighting. They match the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes under prospect theory in tourism specifically: loss-gain asymmetries dependent on circumstances; reversed sensitivities for hedonic experiential goods; and reference points shifted by social factors. Research priorities include trade-offs between age factors, activities, and adaptation costs. Management measures include incentives for more communication and less concealment.

Management implications

Some senior outdoor tourists suffer from prior injuries, illnesses and infirmities that increase risks of health and safety incidents on tour. It is preferable for tour operators that clients reveal these issues at booking, but individual tourists may have incentives to conceal them. We apply the behavioural economics framework of prospect theory to a large global set of tours and incidents, and numerous replicates of one tour, to identify factors controlling tourists’ choices, and hence the incentives that tour operators can adopt to minimise concealment. We propose multiple practical approaches to address these concerns.