Tourists are exposed to various unfamiliar sensory experiences when travelling, such as sounds, touches, tastes and temperatures. Barsalou (2008) documents that sensory experiences and bodily feelings serve as unique sources of tacit information that influence people's cognition, emotion and behavior subconsciously. This notion is anchored in (bodily) feelings-as-information theory (Greifeneder, Bless, & Pham, 2011; Schwarz & Clore, 1983; Slovic, Finucane, Peters, & MacGregor, 2007) according to which people consult their affective states subconsciously to make judgments about objects (eg, situations, people, the self or the environment) unrelated to the bodily senses. Thus, cognitive processes and mental states are deeply rooted in the body's interaction with the world (Wilson, 2002). The sensory inputs can be associated directly with the judgment task itself or spill-over from sources that have no direct link with (ie, are incidental to) the judgment task. Consider the following illustrative example: Traditional sensory marketing uses the smell of citrus fruit to signal freshness and cleanliness, whereas in embodied cognition, the sensory experience of the citrus smell is incidentally and metaphorically projected upon others as being morally more pure (Lee & Schwarz, 2012). That is, incidental embodied experiences differ from tourism research which only examines the direct sensory dimensions of tourist experiences, such as sensory destination aspects (Agapito, Valle, & Mendes, 2014) or the use of aroma marketing (Guillet, Kozak, & Kucukusta, 2019). Embodied cognition is also different from the sociology-and geography-informed embodiment literature which explores the role of the body in the consumption of places (Chronis, 2012; Rakić & Chambers, 2012). Embodied cognitive reactions can also be created by merely having people imagine bodily sensations as well as reading linguistic expressions related to sensory-based metaphors (Ijzerman & Semin, 2009). The embodied experiences that lead to incidental cognitive reactions, attitudes and behavior are highly relevant for tourism research, yet remain unexplored, and thus serve as the focus of this research note. Interestingly, although the concrete sensory domain (eg, weight, temperature) typically serves as the source (ie, embodied) concept that creates abstract incidental thoughts about a target concept, many of these reactions are bidirectional. For example, while a heavy book is regarded as being more important than a light one, when told a book is important, people also provide a higher weight estimate (Schneider, Rutjens, Jostmann, & Lakens, 2011). We introduce the reader to the seminal literature on embodied cognition, and suggest intriguing avenues for tourism research that provide new explanations for tourist behavior. We explore sensory inputs that have incidental impacts on tourist behavior, and introduce examples in Table 1 that highlight additional embodied cognitive areas for tourism researchers to test empirically. Temperature is one of the most powerful sensory experiences, and affects the psychosocial valuation of self and others in surprising ways. Cold temperatures elicit perceptions of loneliness and social rejection (Williams & Bargh, 2008a). Thus, being exposed to cold temperatures makes people seek compensatory psychosocial warmth, expressed through increased interest in social activities (Lee, Rotman, & Perkins, 2014). Other research shows that when people hold a hot cup of tea they perceive others as more https://doi. org/10.1016/j. annals. 2019.05. 002 Received 19 March 2019; Received in revised form 7 May 2019; Accepted 9 May 2019