5.1. Theoretical Implications
Our findings show that intervening on information changes tourists’ spatial behavior substantially, but has only limited implications for their experiences, extending existing knowledge in several ways. First, we assert that information provided to tourists firmly belongs in the theoretical discussion about causes and consequences of overtourism. While much has been written about the macro-level social forces that cause a destination to be crowded and bring its local residents into conflict with tourists [Second, we show that addressing crowding using an information intervention is moderately more effective with a conversational recommender, which is also much more positively evaluated, than with a passive map-based app. While positive experiences of personalized recommender systems in tourism were previously documented [Third, our study contributes evidence of modest variation in tourist experience over space on the temporal scale of differences between days over an entire vacation. Previous studies showed that single tourist experience episodes (e.g., city walks; guided tours) vary over urban space [Correspondingly, vacations were evaluated equally no matter of which attractions tourists were informed. Thus, our findings dispel the persistent myth in destination management that promoting only lesser-visited attractions will ‘ruin’ a vacation. We surmise that this may be due to novelty, the experience that vacation surroundings are new and different from everyday life. This explains a substantial proportion of the positive emotion boost people experience during vacationing [