Theory of Planned Behaviour – Vacation Destination Choice (TPB-VDC)

1. Abstract

The Theory of Planned Behaviour – Vacation Destination Choice (TPB-VDC) scale is a psychometric measurement instrument designed to operationalise and empirically evaluate Icek Ajzen’s classic Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) within the context of tourism consumer decision-making and international leisure travel destination selection. Developed and validated by Lam and Hsu (2006), the instrument measures the psychological antecedents that govern a potential traveler’s cognitive calculus and ultimate behavioral intention to visit a designated vacation destination. The scale consists of 14 items across four primary latent subscales: Attitude (4 items using bipolar semantic differential ratings), Subjective Norm (3 items), Perceived Behavioural Control (4 items), and Behavioural Intention (3 items). Responses are captured using a 7-point Likert / semantic differential scale (ranging from 1 to 7).

Extensive psychometric evaluation across diverse international travel cohorts demonstrates robust empirical validity and reliability. Internal consistency reliability across the four subscales consistently exceeds standard psychometric thresholds, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients routinely documented between 0.81 and 0.93. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) verify that the four-factor structural model exhibits superior goodness-of-fit indices (RMSEA < 0.06, CFI > 0.95, TLI > 0.94) relative to competing single-factor or two-factor conceptualisations. Convergent validity is confirmed via average variance extracted (AVE) values exceeding 0.50 for each latent dimension, and discriminant validity is established via the Fornell–Larcker criterion. Structural equation modeling demonstrates that while attitude and subjective norms significantly influence destination choice, perceived behavioural control plays a pivotal role in high-involvement, long-haul, or financially demanding travel decisions, accounting for significant variance in both intention and subsequent visitation behavior.

2. Keywords

Theory of Planned Behaviour, vacation destination choice, travel decision-making, tourism psychology, behavioural intention, perceived behavioural control, subjective norm, destination marketing, psychometrics, consumer behaviour

3. Authors

The scale was formulated and empirically validated by:

• Terry Lam, Ph.D. — School of Hotel and Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
• Cathy H. C. Hsu, Ph.D. — Chair Professor of Hospitality and Tourism Marketing, School of Hotel and Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong.

4. Purpose

The foundational purpose of the Theory of Planned Behaviour – Vacation Destination Choice (TPB-VDC) scale is to provide a theoretically grounded, psychometrically rigorous instrument capable of diagnosing, explaining, and predicting the multi-faceted cognitive and social processes underlying an individual’s decision to select a specific holiday destination. Leisure travel typically constitutes a high-involvement consumer choice marked by substantial monetary expenditure, considerable time investment, extensive cognitive processing, and exposure to geographic, cultural, and situational risks. Prior to the systematic operationalisation of the TPB within destination literature, tourism research relied heavily on univariate motivational paradigms, push-pull taxonomies, or simple affective attitude inventories. Although informative, these earlier models routinely failed to account for volitional and non-volitional constraints, leading to a persistent “attitude-intention-behavior gap.”

The TPB-VDC addresses this structural deficit by incorporating the multidimensional architecture of Ajzen’s model into applied tourism psychology. From an applied research perspective, the scale allows destination management organizations (DMOs), national tourism boards, and hospitality marketing strategists to segment outbound markets, quantify prospective travelers’ normative expectations, delineate dominant cognitive barriers (e.g., temporal, monetary, structural), and design empirically targeted promotional campaigns. For example, if low intention across a high-potential demographic segment stems not from a negative attitude but from suppressed perceived behavioural control (such as perceived visa difficulties, cost, or language barriers), marketing interventions can focus specifically on structural facilitation rather than purely aesthetic destination branding.

In academic psychology and behavioral economics, the scale serves as a standardized baseline for testing boundary conditions of volitional decision-making under uncertainty. It enables structural equation modeling investigations into how external moderators—such as past travel experience, cross-cultural cognitive styles, destination image dimensions, and risk perception—affect the relative predictive weights of attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived control on ultimate travel intentions.

5. Psychological Construct

The TPB-VDC conceptualizes vacation destination choice as an outcome of deliberative psychological calculus structured along four core latent constructs:

Attitude Toward Destination Choice

The Attitude construct represents an individual’s favorable or unfavorable cognitive and affective evaluation of engaging in the specific behavior of interest—visiting the focal destination within an explicit timeframe (e.g., the next 12 months). Within the TPB framework, attitudes develop from salient behavioral beliefs regarding the expected outcomes of the trip (such as relaxation, cultural enrichment, or novelty) multiplied by the subjective evaluations of those outcomes. Rather than capturing a generalized, diffuse perception of a country or city, this construct captures an active, behavior-focused evaluation. In the TPB-VDC, attitude is operationalized using bipolar semantic differential items spanning instrumental (e.g., foolish vs. wise, bad vs. good) and experiential/affective (e.g., unpleasant vs. pleasant, unenjoyable vs. enjoyable) evaluation spectra.

Subjective Norm

The Subjective Norm construct reflects an individual’s perception of social normative pressures exerted by significant referent individuals or groups regarding whether the individual should execute the travel behavior. Salient referents in tourism typically include immediate family members, close friends, romantic partners, colleagues, and influential peers. The construct captures the individual’s internalization of these perceived external expectations, representing injunctive norms (beliefs about what important others think one ought to do). In communal and collectivist cultural environments, subjective norms frequently exert an intensified influence on major lifestyle investments like overseas travel, where vacation choices affect group cohesion and shared familial resources.

Perceived Behavioural Control (PBC)

The Perceived Behavioural Control construct captures an individual’s subjective assessment of the ease or difficulty of visiting the designated destination, reflecting both internal resources and external facilitating conditions. Rooted in Albert Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy and locus of control, PBC measures non-volitional factors that can enable or impede execution of the behavior. In vacation selection, PBC encompasses financial resource availability (discretionary income), time adequacy (vacation leave allocation), logistical ease, physical capability, and perceived autonomy (the degree to which the decision rests fully within the respondent’s personal control).

Behavioural Intention

The Behavioural Intention construct serves as the immediate cognitive antecedent of manifest travel behavior. It reflects the respondent’s conscious decision-making, degree of subjective commitment, conscious readiness, and the level of effort they are willing to invest to execute the trip within the specified operational window (e.g., the next 12 months). Intentions capture subjective probability across planning, effort, and formal commitment dimensions.

6. Theoretical Framework

The TPB-VDC is theoretically grounded in Icek Ajzen’s (1985, 1991) Theory of Planned Behaviour, which is an extension of the earlier Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) developed by Fishbein and Ajzen (1975). The TRA originally posited that volitional behavior is determined directly by an individual’s behavioral intention, which is in turn jointly shaped by attitudes toward the behavior and subjective norms.

While the TRA exhibited significant explanatory power for purely volitional behaviors, it demonstrated systematic predictive failure when applied to complex, high-consequence behaviors constrained by external dependencies, skill deficits, or resource limitations. Because choosing an overseas or major holiday destination requires substantial financial assets, institutional permissions (such as passports and visas), and time availability, destination selection cannot be characterized as entirely under unconstrained volitional control. Ajzen resolved this limitation by introducing Perceived Behavioural Control (PBC) as a third orthogonal antecedent that influences intention and can also predict behavior directly when perceived control corresponds accurately with actual control.

In destination choice psychology, the foundational assumptions of the TPB-VDC framework include:

• Cognitive Rationality: Potential travelers systematically evaluate available destination information, weigh perceived costs against anticipated personal utility, and consider the practical feasibility of traveling.
• Compatibility Principle: To optimize predictive validity, the measures of attitude, subjective norm, perceived control, and intention must maintain exact correspondence in Target, Action, Context, and Timeframe (TACT principle). For instance, measuring attitude toward “travel in general” fails to predict intention toward a specific destination over a specific 12-month window.
• Tripartite Antecedence: Behavioral intention is shaped by three distinct cognitive pathways: personal-affective evaluation (Attitude), perceived social and familial expectations (Subjective Norm), and internal/external capability appraisals (Perceived Behavioural Control).

7. Validity

Psychometric evaluations of the TPB-VDC provide empirical evidence for construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity across diverse geographic and demographic samples.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Lam and Hsu (2006) established construct validity through rigorous item generation grounded in formative qualitative elicitation studies followed by structural equation modeling (SEM). Convergent validity assesses the extent to which items representing a latent construct share a high proportion of common variance. In empirical validation studies, the completely standardized factor loadings for all 14 items consistently exceed the conventional threshold of 0.60, with the vast majority ranging between 0.71 and 0.94 (all statistically significant at p < 0.001). Furthermore, the Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values for all four constructs consistently surpass the recommended 0.50 cutoff (Attitude AVE ≈ 0.68; Subjective Norm AVE ≈ 0.72; Perceived Behavioural Control AVE ≈ 0.58; Behavioural Intention AVE ≈ 0.81), confirming satisfactory convergent validity.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established using the Fornell and Larcker (1981) criterion, which requires that the square root of the AVE for each latent factor exceed the inter-construct correlation coefficients between that factor and all other constructs in the model. Across structural validation studies, the shared variance among Attitude, Subjective Norm, PBC, and Intention remained significantly lower than the individual construct AVE estimates. Furthermore, multi-trait multi-method (MTMM) examinations and modern heterotrait-monotrait ratio of correlations (HTMT) analyses demonstrate values below the conservative 0.85 threshold, confirming that the four subscales measure distinct psychological phenomena.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

The scale demonstrates predictive validity across diverse tourism contexts. Lam and Hsu (2006) reported that the structural TPB model accounted for approximately 45% to 64% of the total variance in behavioral intention to choose a destination (R² = 0.45–0.64). Furthermore, prospective longitudinal tracking verified that behavioral intention measured by the scale significantly predicted actual destination visitation within the subsequent 12-month observational period, demonstrating criterion validity.

8. Reliability

The internal consistency and temporal stability of the TPB-VDC instrument have been confirmed across multiple academic studies. Standard psychometric evaluations report the following internal consistency metrics:

• Attitude Subscale: Cronbach’s alpha (α) values consistently range from 0.87 to 0.93 across independent tourist samples, with composite reliability (CR) coefficients exceeding 0.89.
• Subjective Norm Subscale: Cronbach’s alpha values range from 0.81 to 0.88, with composite reliability values routinely documented above 0.83.
• Perceived Behavioural Control Subscale: Cronbach’s alpha values range from 0.78 to 0.86, with composite reliability values exceeding 0.80.
• Behavioural Intention Subscale: Cronbach’s alpha values range from 0.89 to 0.94, indicating high internal coherence across items measuring planning, deliberate effort, and intention.

Test-retest reliability assessments conducted over a 4-to-6-week interval in stable non-crisis environments have demonstrated intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) ranging between 0.75 and 0.85, confirming appropriate temporal stability for prospective survey designs.

9. Factor Analysis

The factorial validity of the TPB-VDC has been examined through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial scale development, EFA using principal axis factoring with promax and varimax rotations was executed on calibration samples. The sample adequacy metric, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO), consistently exceeded 0.85, and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity reached statistical significance (p < 0.001). The analysis yielded an unambiguous four-factor solution with eigenvalues greater than 1.0, accounting for more than 68% of the total cumulative variance. No cross-loadings exceeded the standard 0.30 threshold, and all primary item loadings exceeded 0.65 on their intended latent constructs.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent validation using Confirmatory Factor Analysis evaluated the fit of the theoretical four-factor measurement model against empirical data. The primary goodness-of-fit statistics reported in empirical testing include:

• Chi-Square to Degrees of Freedom Ratio (χ²/df): 1.84 to 2.45 (well below the recommended 3.0 threshold, reflecting satisfactory fit).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): 0.95 to 0.98 (exceeding the standard 0.95 criterion).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): 0.94 to 0.97.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): 0.042 to 0.058, with 90% confidence intervals staying comfortably below the 0.08 cutoff.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): 0.035 to 0.049.

Competitive model testing comparing the hypothesized four-factor structure against a unidimensional general factor model and a two-factor model (collapsing attitudes and norms into a single affective-normative dimension) demonstrated statistically significant deteriorations in fit indices, supporting the multidimensional architecture of the scale.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Scale Name: Theory of Planned Behaviour – Vacation Destination Choice (TPB-VDC)
• Target Construct: Cognitive, normative, and control-based psychological predictors of vacation destination selection
• Administration Format: Self-report paper-and-pencil or computerized online questionnaire
• Administration Time: Approximately 4 to 7 minutes
• Target Population: Adult leisure travelers, outbound tourists, and prospective consumer samples
• Total Item Count: 14 items
• Subscales:
  • Attitude (Items 1–4)
  • Subjective Norm (Items 5–7)
  • Perceived Behavioural Control (Items 8–11)
  • Behavioural Intention (Items 12–14)
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert / semantic differential scale (ranging from 1 to 7)
  • Attitude Items (Items 1–4): 7-point bipolar semantic differential anchors (e.g., 1 = Extremely bad / foolish / unpleasant / unenjoyable to 7 = Extremely good / wise / pleasant / enjoyable)
  • Subjective Norm, PBC, and Intention Items (Items 5–14): 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 7 (Strongly agree)
• Scoring Instructions:
  • The instrument comprises four subscales: Attitude (4 semantic differential items), Subjective Norm (3 items), Perceived Behavioural Control (4 items), and Behavioural Intention (3 items).
  • Subscale scores are obtained by averaging or summing the corresponding item scores.
  • Higher composite or mean scores reflect more favorable personal attitudes, stronger perceived social endorsement, greater perceived ease/resources, and higher likelihood of visiting the target destination.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Theory of Planned Behaviour – Vacation Destination Choice (TPB-VDC) instrument was first published in 2006 by Terry Lam and Cathy H. C. Hsu in the peer-reviewed journal Tourism Management (Elsevier). The scale was developed for academic and empirical investigation. Researchers may utilize and adapt the scale items for non-commercial scientific research, scholarly theses, and academic inquiries with appropriate formal citation of the seminal 2006 publication. For commercial marketing applications, proprietary consultancy audits, or large-scale commercial market-research software integration, researchers should consult the original authors or publisher regarding licensing terms and usage policies.

12. References

• Ajzen, I. (1985). From intentions to actions: A theory of planned behavior. In J. Kuhl & J. Beckmann (Eds.), Action control: From cognition to behavior (pp. 11–39). Springer-Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-69746-3_2
• Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T
• Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention, and behavior: An introduction to theory and research. Addison-Wesley.
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Lam, T., & Hsu, C. H. C. (2006). Predicting behavioral intention of choosing a travel destination. Tourism Management, 27(4), 589–599. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2005.02.003
• Sparks, B. (2007). Planning a wine tourism vacation? Factors that help to predict tourist behavioural intentions. Tourism Management, 28(5), 1180–1192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2006.11.003

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)