No risk, no fun: The role of perceived risk in adventure tourism

There is a long tradition in tourism research to investigate the issue of perceived risk. The reason lies in the tourism industry’s aim to reduce the risk perceptions among tourist in order to increase sales. Perceived risk is thus seen as a hurdle to attracting tourists and the managerial aim is to reduce it. At the same time there is a sub-sector of tourism industry, adventure tourism that seems to work in precisely the opposite way: perceived risk is something attractive to the potential consumers, something they are actively searching for. The aim of this paper is to investigate past literature on risk in the context of tourism consumer behaviour and to compare operationalisations of perceived risk in this context that have been developed in the past. This paper is a review paper and as such functions as an initial step of an exploratory study to determine factors of demandincreasing perceived risk relevant to define the concept. Based on the review an initial conceptualisation of demand-increasing perceived risk (desired risk) in the area of adventure tourism is provided.