When making decisions about their future dream holidays, tourists often spend significant time thinking about future scenarios. This is an example of ‘mental time travel’, a process called prospection. The concept of prospection refers to human ability of ‘pre-experience’ the future and hence how that future ‘feels’, which is why it is sometimes called affective forecasting. There is a large volume of psychological research on prospection, but in applied fields, the use of various terms makes the current literature complex, disconnected and hard to navigate. This chapter provides an introduction to prospection as an underlying mechanism explaining some of the effects of experiential marketing. It discusses tourism prospection-related terms, errors of prospection and mental biases and ways to better manage tourist experiences.
