Many tourism studies consider elicited reasons for undertaking a behavior (e.g., visiting a destination) as the basis from which tourist motives are inferred. Such an approach is problematic principally because it ignores a dual motivational system in which explicit as well as implicit types of motives drive behavior. This paper tackles the conceptual challenge of differentiating explicit from implicit motives in tourism studies or the lack thereof. It reviews the need to discriminate between the two constructs, theorize their interrelationship and assess their relative significance in predicting a wide and varied interconnected array of travel behavior.