Self-Assessing the Benefits of Educational Tours

This article assesses the effectiveness of retrospective self-assessments in evaluating the impact and benefits of educational-heritage tours. This is done by comparing tourists' retrospective self-assessments with the degree of change between their pre- and posttour evaluations. The survey population consists of 10,374 youth from dozens of countries who participated in educational tours to Israel. All completed questionnaires before and after the tours. It was found that their self-assessments of the tour's impact reliably reflect changes in attitude as measured by parallel questions in the pre- and posttour surveys. Thus, the article makes a methodological contribution to tourism research, an area of the literature that is relatively scarce. The extent to which researchers may rely upon the less expensive and logistically simpler self-assessment method to evaluate tourist experiences is discussed.