1. Introduction
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Cities attracting large numbers of tourists increasingly face crowding and public resistance to tourism growth. As a result, governments strive to spread tourists from the best-known attractions to less-visited locations to improve both residents’ and tourists’ quality of life. Evidence of success and best practices herein is largely anecdotal, and the effects on tourist experience are also unknown. Thus, we undertook a randomized 2 × 2 experiment in the province of Overijssel (The Netherlands), wherein tourists staying at vacation parks near small and mid-sized cities were exposed to information which emphasized attractions in either heavily visited or less-visited areas. Participants were also assigned to receive the information in either a passive or a conversational form. Location and daily emotion, as well as experience evaluation on the last day of the vacation, were recorded via mobile platforms. We found that tourists receiving information on attractions in less-visited areas engaged in significantly more movements around these attractions, and significantly less around heavily visited areas. The conversational form of information delivery was more positively evaluated than information delivered passively. Furthermore, vacation experience emotions and evaluations were largely unaffected. Thus, it is clearly possible to direct tourists to less-crowded locations without negatively affecting their vacation experiences.Cities that attract large numbers of tourists increasingly face crowding and public resistance to tourism growth. This phenomenon is best-documented, though not limited to, cities, and has been termed An alleged mechanism of tourist spatial behavior is information that tourists consume. This information includes guidebooks, review sites, and social media. It is believed that the most-used information sources tend to echo one another, steering tourists to a relatively small number of attractions. At the same time, other places where tourist could have enjoyable experiences, remain undiscovered and suffer, to some degree, from undertourism. Important in existing visions for resetting tourism after the pandemic is bringing these under-/and over-visited places more into balance. For example, the Destination Management Organization (DMO) of The Netherlands, called The Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions (NBTC), wrote in 2019, thus based on pre-pandemic tourism levels, that “Heading up to 2030, we expect a 50 percent increase in the number of international tourists. This requires a new approach that prioritises the common interests of visitors, companies, and residents. The goal is for every Dutch person to benefit from tourism. Five priorities are central for achieving this ambition, [including to] put more cities and regions on the map as attractive destinations” [Therefore, in the present study, we aimed to test an intervention to inform tourists about attractions in less-visited areas, in contrast to attractions in heavily visited areas. How information provided by DMOs affects tourist flows is generally unknown, and no studies exist as far as we could find that have manipulated experimentally and then tracked spatial behavior by tracking tourists’ locations. We carried this intervention out over two distinct information channels to uncover how information 