Simple vs. Complex Aesthetics in Tourism: Exploring Tourists' Preferences

Gestalt theory proposes that individuals tend to process design as a whole rather than as scattered parts (Chou, 2011; Orth & Malkewitz, 2008). Visual elements of a design are important heuristic cues in the process of consumer judgment and decision-making (Chen et al., 2023; Favier et al., 2019). This processing is typically quick, and largely automatic in that consumers use it to make fast decisions (Eytam et al., 2021; Sevilla & Townsend, 2016).

This paper's focus is on simple versus complex aesthetics in the design and presentation of tourism products and environments. Recent evidence shows that minimalism has been gaining increasing popularity in many circles (Chen et al., 2023; Wilson & Bellezza, 2022). This trend has likewise been suggested in tourism research (Chen & Wei, 2022). Tourism products and services, such as souvenirs and restaurants, can be presented in either simple or complex formats. Pieters, Wedel, and Batra (2010) initially proposed six general principles that determine the design complexity of ads, including the number of objects, the detail of objects, the similarity of objects, the regularity of objects, the symmetry of object arrangement, and the regularity of object arrangement. These rules have also been generalized to products (Eytam et al., 2021), packages (Chen et al., 2023; Favier et al., 2019), online ads (Kusumasondjaja & Tjiptono, 2019), service environments (Orth & Wirtz, 2014), and web interfaces (Deng & Poole, 2010) to determine whether a design is simple or complex. Tourists' choices (i.e., preference for simple/complex aesthetics), might prove to be different from some extant literature regarding tourists' decision-making processes as the latter mainly focuses on how tourists make their basic travel choices regarding accommodation and destination (Karl, Kock, Bauer, Ritchie, & Assaf, 2022; McCabe, Li, & Chen, 2016; Tassiello & Tillotson, 2020).

Prior work has identified some additional factors that may affect consumer preference for simple or complex aesthetics. On the one hand, individual differences, such as age, social comparison orientation, and maximization tendency, can influence consumers' preference for simple designs. For example, compared to younger adults, older ones tend to prefer the simple over the complex because simple designs are easier to understand (Eytam et al., 2021). On the other hand, situational factors can also affect consumers' choices between simple and complex designs. For instance, people primed with a starting temporal landmark (e.g., in the morning, on the first day of a new school term) usually prefer simply packaged products (Chen et al., 2023). Complementing this stream of research, goal conflict is examined as an antecedent of tourists' preference for simple aesthetics.