The Effect of Length of Stay on Travelers' Perceived Satisfaction with Service Quality

SUMMARY

Consumer satisfaction related to service quality during the vacation experience is of paramount importance to the travel and tourism industry. This study tests empirically the effects the number of nights spent on a vacation have on the levels of satisfaction recent travelers report for three service aspects of the travel destination: perceived satisfaction with tourism service providers; perceived “freedom from defects” of tourism services; and perceived reasonableness of the cost of tourism services. Differentiation in satisfaction scores between “short-term visitors” (i.e., those who stayed from one to six nights) and “long-term visitors” (i.e., those who stayed seven or more nights) were examined. Significant differences between the two groups of visitors were present for (1) perceived satisfaction with industry professionals delivering the service experience at the travel destination, (2) perceived satisfaction with “freedom from defects” of the actual services at the destination, and (3) perceived reasonableness of the cost of services at the travel destination. Suggestions for how tourism industry professionals can make use of this information are presented.     

Sustainability-oriented Service Innovation: fourteen-year longitudinal case study of a tourist accommodation provider

Abstract

Progressing sustainable tourism requires both an innovative transition from “unsustainable” tourism and innovative research methods to develop theory and concepts for a sustainable tourism. While there are many ad hoc examples of initiatives, there are very few examples of firms systematically recording their medium-term evolutionary progress. This case study of an accommodation provider uses longitudinal data over 14 years, deductive and inductive methods, and comparison with other similar eco-friendly providers, to provide the first exploration of sustainability-oriented innovation by a firm attempting to make transitions. Findings show how important hindsight and insight are for continuous learning, and how broader community sustainability issues influence the owners’ worldviews. Both learning and changing views are required to support innovation. A Sustainability-oriented Service Innovation model is recommended, recognising the characteristics of a service industry where innovation can be an organic process led by humans for humans and consequently more fuzzy in its progress than the clearly defined steps that are suggested by previous research. This model seeks to assist researchers and practitioners to better measure innovative progress of service firms, and develop more relevant strategies to ease transitions towards sustainable business practices.     

游客感知与政府宣传:资源相似型旅游目的地形象维度对比研究——以云南西双版纳州和德宏州为例

旅游形象研究对资源相似型旅游目的地发展具有现实意义。在已有研究基础上将政府宣传形象纳入资源相似型旅游目的地旅游形象研究范畴,并选取资源禀赋高度近似的西双版纳州和德宏州为案例,实现游客感知与政府宣传旅游形象对比,选择两地游客网络游记与政府宣传网络文本为研究样本,运用内容分析法和IPA模型对两地游客感知与政府宣传旅游形象进行对比研究。研究结果表明:旅游吸引物形象维度在资源相似型目的地旅游形象中具有“非敏感性”;资源相似型旅游目的地游客感知与政府宣传旅游形象呈现出“差异—趋同”特征;资源相似型旅游目的地在“认同—错位”和“差异—趋同”效应的叠加作用下,具有各自的优势旅游形象维度。     

Management challenges with the maintenance of tourism experience concept innovations: Toward a new research agenda

This article suggests a new research agenda within the debates about tourism, the experience economy, and innovation. Knowledge about innovation and value co-creation within experience-based sectors has increased, but most studies focus on the initial steps of the innovation process. We argue that there is a need to focus on challenges that tourism management faces over time when it wishes to maintain innovations in an experience concept. Maintaining such innovations needs to be investigated from an organisational perspective. There are many reasons why it can be challenging to maintain innovative experience concepts over time. We address three important reasons and suggest an analytical model which employs four theoretical constructs namely, the experience concept, the experience system, internal engagement, and external engagement. We illustrate the model by applying it to three case vignettes from experience-based tourism. The case vignettes illuminate how “maintenance” is an important construct within experience innovation research.     

Prospects for Innovation in Tourism

SUMMARY

The tourism product is a composite one with its production, distribution and marketing being configured along a value chain involving many activities which are vertically, horizontally and diagonally related and integrated in varying degrees. Both orthodox and non-orthodox economists agree that innovations will only be undertaken when there is a sufficiently high innovation dividend which pays for the added cost and risk of innovation. Thus profitability appears to be the strongest explanatory variable both behind investment and innovation. Based on the notion that expected profitability from innovation can serve as the primary independent variable determining innovation behaviour across different economic sectors and/or sub branches of tourism, the paper sets out to establish the innovation potential for each of the tourism value creating economic activities from the provision of information to prospective customers (tourists) in the sending region to post-trip (after sale) services. In addition to the usual profit-generating forces of costs and revenues, such dimensions as firm size and economics of scale, proximity to relevant science and technology (know-how for innovation) through human capital and forms of organisation (e.g., network-organisation and/or clusters) will equally be taken into consideration. This analysis will therefore help in pinpointing those areas of the tourism value chain where innovations are most likely to occur. The paper concludes with the presentation of a model aimed at empirically testing innovation behaviour across the tourism value chain.     

Tourists and researcher identities: critical considerations of collisions,collaborations and confluences in Svalbard

ABSTRACT

Svalbard is an “edge-of-the-world” hot spot for environmental change, political discourse, tourism and scientific research in the Anthropocene. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative research, I use this context to critically explore the identity-categories of “researcher” and “tourist”. Through the lens of political ecology, I draw out the uneven power relations of knowledge production that are attached to these labels and their consequences for ongoing efforts for managing sustainable tourism. By considering the experiences of tourists, researchers and “scientific tourists”, both practically and from an embodied experiential perspective, I challenge the distinctions typically made between these roles. I bring to light several common aspects, goals and experiences these practices share. In doing so, I aim to disrupt the existing hierarchies of knowledge that champion an impersonal, rational scientific approach and call for a more varied array of knowledge and practices to be taken into account when considering the future ecologies of Svalbard and the broader Arctic region.     

Tourist decisions in renting various personal travel modes: A case study in Kitakyushu City,Japan

Recently, personal transportation modes have diversified remarkably, and rental use in a tourism area can be one of the strategies to popularize them. This study focused on Kitakyushu City, Japan, and analyzed users' decision-making processes to choose among four modes (ultra-lightweight vehicles [ULVs], electric-assisted bicycles, electric scooters, and electric four-wheel carts) by four evaluation standards: “safety,” “convenience,” “mobility,” and “joy.” The results found that, regarding overall satisfaction of the rental service, most users were satisfied and want to use it in a tourism area as an alternative to, primarily, private cars, even if the service will be provided under a continuous-charging model. In addition, a detailed analysis of the decision-making process of rental use showed that users ranked the criteria in descending order of importance as “safety,” “convenience,” “joy,” and “mobility,” and regarded ULVs as the most preferable transportation mode.     

Digital free tourism – An exploratory study of tourist motivations

The problem of technology overuse - and related mental health and addiction issues – has spilled over into the tourism context. Recent literature has also suggested that heavy use of technology while travelling could potentially have negative impacts on the overall tourist experience; and that tourists might search for “disconnection” while travelling. As a result, this study focuses on the recently emerged and scarcely understood phenomenon of “digital free tourism” (DFT), exploring participants' motivations for voluntarily abstaining from, or limiting their use of, technology on their travels. The findings aid relevant theory by identifying four main factors that motivate tourists to participate in DFT – escape, personal growth, health and well-being, relationships – and highlight several exploratory subthemes underlying these motivators. Considering DFT not as an inconvenience but a travel choice, this study can finally aid practitioners to better promote DFT as a tourism product; maximizing the participants’ related benefits and positive experiences.     

Ecotourism after nature: Anthropocene tourism as a new capitalist “fix”

Abstract

How does ecotourism – conventionally characterized by its pursuit of a “natural” experience – confront assertions that “nature is over” attendant to growing promotion of the “Anthropocene”? One increasingly prominent strategy is to try to harness this “end of nature” itself as a novel tourism “product”. If the Anthropocene is better understood as the Capitalocene, as some contend, then this strategy can be viewed as a paradigmatic example of disaster capitalism in which crises precipitated by capitalist processes are themselves exploited as new forms of accumulation. In this way, engagement with the Anthropocene becomes the latest in a series of spatio-temporal “fixes” that the tourism industry can be seen to provide to the capitalist system in general. Here I explore this dynamic by examining several ways in which the prospect of the loss of “natural” resources are promoted as the basis of tourism experience: disaster tourism; extinction tourism; voluntourism; development tourism; and, increasingly, self-consciously Anthropocene tourism as well. Via such strategies, Anthropocene tourism exemplifies capitalism’s astonishing capacity for self-renewal through creative destruction, sustaining itself in a “post-nature” world by continuing to market social and environmental awareness and action even while shifting from pursuit of nonhuman “nature” previously grounding these aims.     

Industrial Heritage Attractions: Types and Tourists

Abstract

Heritage tourism has become an important sector in the tourism industry. In fact, interest in heritage tourism among the American public increased 16% from 1991 to 1995. In spite of this surge in demand for heritage tourism little is known about tourists' visitation to “types” of heritage attractions and if their travel behavior characteristics are related to their patterns of visitation. This study examined both issues in the context of industrial heritage tourism. The results indicated that tourists were visiting “types” of industrial heritage attractions. In addition, there was a relationship between the type of trip they were on, the number of people in their travel party, when they made their decision to visit, and the total number of trips they had taken in the last 12 months and the “type” of industrial heritage attraction they visited.     

What are wilderness areas for? Tourism and political ecologies of wilderness uses and management in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

In global imaginaries, wilderness areas are considered to represent the last parts of “original” nature, untouched by civilization and modernization. In most cases, this is misleading as wilderness environments have been exploited, explored and also converted into administrative units in various protected area networks. Indeed, most wilderness areas have been a part of human–environment interactions for a long time and they have been influenced and modified in that interaction. As a result, wilderness is constitutively a cultural and politically loaded idea. While the Western notion of wilderness as a place where “man himself is a visitor who doesn't remain” represents the global hegemonic conservation thinking, it does not necessarily work with different local realities, meanings and use values of “the wild”. In addition, in recent decades, the tourism industry has placed an increasing interest on nature-based and adventure tourism products creating new kinds of ideas and use needs for the remaining wilderness environments. This paper analyzes empirically how wilderness environments and their roles are seen in the context of new and traditional anthropogenic uses and meanings of wilderness areas. More specifically, the paper uses a political ecology approach to evaluate the use and management priorities in the Finnish Wilderness system.     

Resilience and sustainability: a complementary relationship? Towards a practical conceptual model for the sustainability–resilience nexus in tourism

“Sustainability” has endured as an important concept for tourism scholars, and volumes have been written about how to achieve this holy grail of the tourism industry. Sustainable tourism destinations are often promoted as the ethical choice for discerning travellers, with some marketers taking full advantage of the widely acknowledged ambiguities implicit in the term. More recently “resilience” has generated appeal in the academic tourism literature as a term that might capture core aspects of sustainability, while acknowledging the considerable influences that multiple contexts have on the capacity of communities to adapt and ultimately sustain their tourism enterprises. The resilience concept encompasses an inclusive and integrative “social ecological systems” approach which gives it a firm interdisciplinary underpinning in its application in tourism. While in a tourism context sustainability and resilience are kindred terms, relatively little scholarly effort has been committed to a critical treatment of these concepts. Addressing this deficiency, we present a conceptual model to discuss the relationship between sustainability and resilience in tourism. Drawing on examples from New Zealand's nature-based tourism sector, this conceptual paper explores the insights that a critical treatment of the sustainability–resilience nexus might offer both academics and practitioners in the field of tourism studies.     

Transferring Tourism Knowledge

SUMMARY

Knowledge sharing and quality assurance in hospitality and tourism is a very broad topic to cover. This paper focuses mainly on the role of higher education in transferring knowledge into practice. Knowledge can be defined as “an understanding of something and the ability to use that understanding through study and experience.”¹     

Lifestyle Segmentation in Tourism and Leisure

ABSTRACT

This article examines three different approaches to lifestyle segmentation in improving the quality of tourism and leisure marketing decisions in three separate cases. Tourism and leisure products are prototypical lifestyle purchase yet in many tourism research studies visitors are described by demographics or tourism behaviour only. These cases illustrate different approaches to lifestyle segmentation. Firstly, there are segmentation schemes based on external logic that can be broadly applied across a range of markets, including tourism and leisure. Alternatively, there are schemes that are based on a 'conversation' with the data and which rely on an internal logic within that data that may not transfer to other market contexts. Between these two lie schemes that apply external paradigms to specific datasets. The cases selected illustrate points along this spectrum.

The first case study examines the use by government tourism organizations of lifestyle segmentation 'bought in' from an external source. Here lifestyle segmentation data is collected from a representative sample of the Australian population as part of a commercial “single source” data set. The second case is based on a regional tourism study, which has utilized prior theory to develop its own lifestyle segmentation and at the same time related this to boarder characteristics of tourists in Tropical North Queensland. The third case examines the development of tailored lifestyle segmentation among 'event' spectators based on purely internal criteria unrelated to the broader population. These cases provide insight into the appropriate development and application of lifestyle segmentation and the use of the data by tourism and leisure managers. Managers may think about the type of lifestyle segmentation approach required based on how the segmentation scheme results need to be related to the wider market or population.     

A fuzzy comprehensive evaluation algorithm for analyzing electronic word-of-mouth

This study evaluates tourism experiences shared through electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) across four Chinese attractions. The objective is to develop a framework for evaluating eWOM by constructing an indicator system and implementing an analytic hierarchy process with the use of a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation algorithm. This framework is achieved by mapping more than 6000 websites related to Chinese tourism attractions and filtering over 200,000 useful reviews to measure service performance. Results indicate that ecological–biological attractions failed to make tourists feel “very satisfied” in various aspects, such as overall evaluation, infrastructure, traffic, natural environment, and social environment. Overall, the study contributes by presenting a framework that can be adopted by tourism researchers and industry practitioners to understand tourist preferences and evaluate service performance to improve service quality.     

基于旅游生命周期理论的历史文化街区居民身份认同对旅游发展意向的影响研究

研究以旅游生命周期理论为基础，以武汉市9个处于不同旅游生命周期的历史文化街区为研究区域，通过质性数据分析探讨了居民身份认同对其旅游发展意向的影响，并对处于不同旅游生命周期的街区进行了比较分析。研究发现：居民身份认同主要从情感因素、经济因素、社会环境因素、旅游发展要素、文化因素等方面对其旅游发展意向产生影响；依据身份认同强弱与旅游发展意向正负的交互组合，可将居民分为4种认同-意向类型：积极拥护者、传统坚守者、经济至上者和无为参与者；在不同旅游生命周期阶段的历史文化街区，居民身份认同对其旅游发展意向的影响各异：在参与和巩固阶段街区，传统坚守者突出；在发展阶段街区，积极拥护者占主导；在巩固阶段街区，积极拥护者和无为参与者兼而有之，且二者冲突尤为激烈。最后，针对不同旅游生命周期阶段居民的类型和特征，提出了促进居民参与街区旅游发展与保护的建议。     

Designing a Hospitality Ethics Course Content from the Students' Perspective

ABSTRACT

In managing a curriculum, it is important to solicit students' perspective to ensure that it is relevant to their interest and needs. Therefore, in an attempt to develop content for a hospitality ethics course, this study conducts a questionnaire survey with 520 hospitality students to help identify the importance of 39 ethical issues in the hospitality industry. As suggested by Thomas, Clermont, and Maimbolwa-Sinyangwe (1984) and DuFrene, Elliott-Howard, and Daniel (1990), if an ethical issue is judged to be important, it can serve as a topic around which part of the course is to be developed. The top three most important issues are found to be “Disposal of hazardous waste,” “Acceptance of bribes or gifts by employees” and “Sexual harassment on the job.”     

Dependency on Tour Operators

Abstract

Tour operators have increasingly emerged as the most powerful and influential factor of international flows from the main generating countries to various destinations, since they are able to interpret and manipulate the “push” and “pull” factors of the tourism process to a commercial end. As a result, many tourist-receiving destinations have to face the intervention of foreign tour operators in their tourism industry. Despite the crucial role played by tour operators for the development of insular regions' tourism, little empirical evidence is available on the relationship between tour operators and the destination tourism suppliers. This paper presents the findings of a study undertaken during the summer of 1997 on the Greek island of Crete. From the findings, it is evident that the Cretan tourism industry is heavily dependent on tour operators, and that various actions should be undertaken by the island's public and private sector to overcome this problem.     

The Role of Market Orientation in Managing Crises During the Post-Crisis Phase

SUMMARY

The tourism business around the world, as one of the most susceptible and vulnerable sectors, must often manage and survive global crises. In recent years the global tourism industry has experienced major crises, such as terrorist attacks, political instability, economic recession, biosecurity threats and natural disasters. The most well-known cases bear testimony to the fact that crises are not new to the tourism industry. However, tourism management capabilities and abilities to deal with complex and critical situations are limited. The time has come to develop an understanding of factors that can help tourism businesses prepare a way of getting through such crises by examining the role of market orientation and its antecedents during a post-crisis phase. This paper is concerned with the effects of several organizational factors on market orientation in airlines during the post-crisis phase of the terrorist attacks of “9/11.” The results indicate that top management factors, interdepartmental factors and organizational systems have a positive effect on market orientation after a crisis has occurred.     

Students' summer tourism: Determinants of length of stay (LOS)

Studies scrutinizing the economic aspects of student tourism at the micro-level are rare in the literature. Set against this background, the present study examines the variation in a sample of Norwegian students' length of stay at summer vacation destinations in 2014. Three estimation methods – an OLS regression model, a Weibull survival model and a zero-truncated negative binomial regression model – provide qualitatively similar results regarding how a number of determinants affect length of stay. In particular, the results show that daily trip costs, booking time, tourism and trip motives, trip month and gender explain much of the variation in length of stay. Of special interest is the comparison of two segments differing on when trip duration is determined: the “pre-fixed” returners (75% of the sample) and the “open” returners (25%). In this regard, the results suggest that the “open” returners stay longer on their trips than the “pre-fixed” ones. Finally, the study provides some implications for future length of stay research.