Beyond symbolic: the role of tourism ethnocentrism in domestic travel

Abstract

As a positive ingroup bias, tourism ethnocentrism (TE) is considered a symbolic reason for travelling that drives tourists to choose domestic destinations as a way of supporting their country and its tourism industry. To provide an additional perspective on TE, through the lens of cognitive dissonance and rationalization, we studied its relationships with other factors that could affect tourists’ decision to travel domestically. The study was conducted in Serbia and used structural equation modelling to test these relationships. Our findings indicate that tourism xenophilia and tourism thalassophilia, defined as a preference for seaside summer holidays, do not affect TE and have only a limited negative impact on willingness to travel domestically. Constraints for travelling abroad and increased destination awareness as a consequence of the pandemic positively affect TE, thus questioning its purely symbolic nature and indicating that levels of TE in tourists could change due to external factors.