Curating memories of a future past: Anticipated nostalgia, prospective memory and travel decisions

Tourism often includes temporal dimensions due to time differences between booking and travel, leading to future imaginings and anticipations of both the journey and its positive outcomes upon returning home. Yet, we know little about the dynamic or bi-directional of these projection processes. This study introduces “anticipated nostalgia” to tourism research, revealing these bidirectional mental time-travel processes and their influence on tourist decision-making. Employing a constructivist cognitive framework and a grounded theory approach from psychology, our findings suggest that anticipated nostalgia acts as a cognitive heuristic, enhancing travel impulsivity, shaping prospective memories, and influencing proactive memory behaviors. We identify key factors influencing anticipated nostalgia, showing how prospective memory helps understand tourists' imaginative engagement with the future and therefore, decision-making processes.