Most of these studies focused on ei

Most of these studies focused on either a particular decision or on several decisions made by seniors that were analyzed in isolation. However, the literature on tourists’ decision-making processes shows that the various decisions adopted in the tourism context make them more difficult to analyze (Eymann and Ronning 1992; Fesenmaier and Jeng 2000). This article argues that tourists’ decision making is a staged process in which the different choices are sequential, interrelated, and interdependent (Dellaert, Borgers, and Timmermans 1997; Fesenmaier and Jeng 2000). The literature has also noted that the degree of complexity of tourists’ decisions is contingent on the services involved (Nysveen 2003), which may make some information search strategies more predominant than others. Thus, this article suggests that analyzing senior tourists’ choices should reflect a staged decision-making process, and that the determinant variables may have a differential influence on each stage.