The impacts of climate change, such as extreme weather events, can negatively affect tourism destinations and divert tourists. Thus, it is important for destinations to understand how tourists perceive climate change. However, there is limited research on how travelling from one place to another influences tourist perceptions. We explore how tourist mobility influences the timeframes under which tourists perceive adverse events to occur and their levels of concern about their occurrence at the Gold Coast, Australia, and globally. Cognitive optimism and other cognitive biases are explored to explain differences in tourist perceptions of climate change.

In 2015, a total of 397 surveys were collected from domestic and international tourists at the Gold Coast. Non-parametric tests showed that tourists perceived that ten different climate change impacts would occur sooner and at a greater magnitude globally compared with the Gold Coast. Participants also expressed greater concern about faraway places than the place of survey (the Gold Coast). Thus, tourists displayed both spatial and temporal biases towards events that seemed further away. Several key variables influenced perceptions of climate change, including direct experience with events, gender, and parenthood, confirming earlier research in the area of risk perceptions of climate change.   This research contributes to the theory of cognitive bias and risk perceptions by providing evidence that tourists who travel and change location adopt a spatial bias similar to that which has been found for local residents in earlier studies.