This study aims to assess the factors that influence consumer attitude towards a destination, and to present a new conceptual framework for further investigation of the role of cognition and metacognition in tourism attitudinal research. Existing research in social psychology has established that three factors influence consumer attitude; amount of thought, valence of thinking and thought confidence. While cognition, amount and valence of thinking, has been studied previously in tourism research, metacognition, measured as thought confidence, is often overlooked in the field. To address this gap, this research note employs the self-validation hypothesis from social psychology to explore consumers’ attitudes towards a tourism destination. The findings show metacognition plays a central role in forming destination attitude. Also, valence of thinking has the strongest impact on attitude. This research note contributes to tourism knowledge by exploring the cognitive and metacognitive aspects of attitude formation. In addition, this study adds value by proposing a model to guide future tourism attitudinal research.