Tourist experience of slow tourism: from authenticity to place attachment – a mixed-method study based on the case of slow city in China

ABSTRACT

This study connected slow tourism with the concept of authenticity and place attachment using a mixed-method approach. Different factors were seen as likely to influence the behavioral intention. Yaxi town (the first international slow city in China) was chosen as the research site. Results show that authenticity in the context of slow tourism include objective authenticity, constructivism authenticity and existential authenticity. Authenticity partly influence place attachment and behavioral intention; two dimensions of place attachment have significant effect on behavioral intention. Findings of this study can be applied to slow tourism marketing and slow destination management.     

EXPERIENCING FILM TOURISM: Authenticity & Fellowship

Authenticity, existential authenticity, sincerity, hyperreality and simulacra are overlapping concepts often used in accounting for the tourist experience. This study discusses these concepts in the context of a case study of Lord of the Rings film-induced tourism to New Zealand. Findings support an elaborated and extended version of authenticity that incorporates aspects of object and existential authenticity, sincerity of relationships and embodied experiences of place. These factors underpin tourists’ judgments and experiences of authenticity. Links are drawn between this analysis and the theoplacity framework for religious pilgrimage. It is concluded that value emanates not only from objects or sights but also from the moments of embodied interaction with place and others, which actively constitute those objects and sights.     

Pilgrimage,consumption and rituals: Spiritual authenticity in a Shia Muslim pilgrimage

A critical dimension of pilgrimage is arguably pilgrims' experience, in particular the authenticity of their experience. The aim of the study is to understand how authenticity is evoked in a religious pilgrimage and the relationship between authenticity, rituals and consumption. The research contributes ethnographic insights from a lesser known, yet significant, Muslim pilgrimage called Ziyara-t-Arba'een. In so doing, pilgrimages are conceptualised as a quest for spiritual authenticity, a hybrid form of existential, ideological and objective authenticity. The findings section leads to a discussion of the ways in which spiritual authenticity is realised through rituals and the consumption of texts, material objects and space. The contribution of this paper is threefold: 1) it explores the different dimensions of authenticity in a pilgrimage experience; 2) it examines the role of material culture and ritual consumption in achieving forms of authenticity; and 3) it broadens the understanding of the pilgrimage as a context-bound and culturally specific phenomenon.     

Authentic dining experiences in ethnic theme restaurants

The literature on ethnic theme restaurants has already shown that patrons of such restaurants often wish to experience authentic ethnic culture, and customer satisfaction correlates with authenticity. This study examines the relationship between importance and performance of perceptions of authentic dining experiences in ethnic theme restaurants, and attempts to verify the influence of authentic dining experiences on repurchase intention in ethnic theme restaurants. After designing questionnaire content and sampling, this study obtained 538 samples. The analytical results show that authentic dining experiences effectively indicate customer repurchase intention. This study thus concludes that to attract more customers, ethnic theme restaurants should improve their service, settings, and food to provide customers a more authentic dining experience.     

Heritage authenticities – a case study of authenticity perceptions at a Danish heritage site

Authenticity in reconstructions of the past is essential to heritage management, and new technologies have made this a highly pertinent dilemma. Demands for new interpretation offers and experiences raise questions of the extent to which such demands can or should be met. New technologies have already made their way into the heritage industry as a means of innovation for interpretation offers, among these is augmented reality. New technologies have made a limited break-through arguably rooted in conservatism among heritage managers. This raises a question of managers' understandings and perceptions of authenticity and effects on heritage and new technologies. Based on an exploratory case, Lindholm Høje Viking burial and museum in Denmark, this paper proposes that different conceptions of authenticity can co-exist within the tourist setting, whereby new technologies can be implemented to strengthen heritage sites as tourism attractions while still paying attention to authenticity and ongoing authentication processes. Abstract, conceptual discussions of authenticity often stress the extremes, but it is here argued that a combination can exist in practice. The paper also suggests that understanding levels and patterns of authenticity among various groups of actors is central to discussions of authenticity and its role in tourism settings.     

Toward an Understanding of Tourists’ Authentic Heritage Experiences: Evidence from Hong Kong

Authenticity in tourism has been a topic of discussion since the 1960s, but the concept is still to be fully developed. This study focuses on tourists’ perceptions of authenticity, and in particular how they evaluate authentic heritage experiences. The appearance and physical settings of attractions were found to be the initial and most important indicators of authentic or inauthentic experiences. Other criteria for assessing the authenticity of heritage experiences include the presence of local culture and customs, constructed elements, commodification, and atmosphere.     

How do authenticity and quality perceptions affect dining experiences and recommendations of food trucks? The moderating role of perceived risk

A growing number of food trucks differentiate themselves in the competitive market by serving ethnic foods. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of customers’ authenticity and quality perceptions of ethnic food trucks on their memorable dining experience (MDE) and, consequently, word of mouth (WOM) while considering customers’ perceived risk. Data were collected from 540 customers who had dined at ethnic food trucks in the U.S. Structural equation modeling and hierarchical regression were employed to test the proposed hypotheses. The results indicated that authenticity perceptions influence quality perceptions and dining satisfaction directly, and MDE indirectly through dining satisfaction. Moreover, dining satisfaction affects WOM directly as well as indirectly through MDE. Among the three dimensions of perceived risk, hygienic risk mitigates both of the relationships between authenticity perceptions and dining satisfaction as well as between quality perceptions and dining satisfaction. Implications and suggestions for future research were discussed.     

Fine-dining in prisons: Online TripAdvisor reviews of The Clink training restaurants

This study evaluated customer reviews about The Clink restaurants to understand how they are rated and what experience is gained by fine dining in a prison. The Clink Charity runs training restaurants in four U.K. prisons and aims to change attitudes and transform lives through prisoner rehabilitation. This research used an interpretive case study of the Clink restaurants to evaluate online customer reviews posted on TripAdvisor. In total, 3951 reviews were analysed using Leximancer 5.0. The most prominent themes were Food: ‘fine-dining in prisons’, Visit: ‘The Clink ambassadors’, and Prison: ‘the inside and outside divide’. Despite the prison location, customers reported having exceptional, professional and memorable dining experiences delivered by highly trained chefs, and that the front of house staff would rival those in many fine-dining restaurants. Further research is required to confirm how dining at a Clink restaurant may have potentially begun to change the public perceptions of prisoners.     

Language representation of restaurants: Implications for developing online recommender systems

As a marketing tool recommender systems have the potential to provide relevant and highly personalized information to consumers. However, developing effective recommender systems requires a substantive understanding of consumers’ preferences as well as meaningful ways to represent hospitality and travel products. This paper argues that language holds the key to understanding consumer preferences and therefore developing effective online recommender systems. Specifically, it explores the nature of the language used by consumers to describe their dining experiences in contrast to the language used by restaurant websites. The findings indicate that consumers use substantially different vocabularies from restaurant websites to describe dining experiences. This study provides implications for developing online recommender systems for restaurants as well as general hospitality and travel products.     

Why Heidegger did not travel: Existential angst,authenticity, and tourist experiences

“Authenticity” continues to be debated within tourism studies, as seen in the extensive number of articles published in ATR since 1999 on this subject. Advocates of existential authenticity have used the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger to argue that tourists seek experiences that counter the emptiness of everyday life in modern societies and provide them an opportunity to be more authentic. This is, however, based on a partial reading of Heidegger. His work implicitly questions the efficacy of travel as a means of experiencing a greater awareness of one’s own place in the world and explicitly rejects cosmopolitanism as a worldview. Rather than a new intervention, ‘existential authenticity’ is a return to a familiar travel/tourist dichotomy.     

Beyond the authentic taste: The tourist experience at a food museum restaurant

This study investigates the factors influencing food experiences perceived by food tourists in the context of a food museum and its associated restaurant. A qualitative exploratory approach was employed, using Chinese tourists visiting Hangzhou Cuisine Museum in Zhejiang province. This research finds that food tourists look for knowledge accumulation and gastronomic experiences when visiting a food museum and restaurant complex, and each experience is formed by both tourist and setting factors. The findings highlight the significant and more complex engagement of setting factors in the museum restaurants. The institutionalised characteristics of museums are equally expected within the in-house restaurants, and social trust in the museum along with external factors that verify authentic representation of the museum contributed to the perceived authenticity of the food tourist's dining experience. This paper discusses broad implications for food experience design at food museums and restaurants as emerging tourism attractions.     

Deconstructing the internal structure of perceived authenticity for heritage tourism

Abstract

Although modern society is more inclined to view authenticity from a postmodernist perspective, few quantitative studies on heritage tourism explored existential authenticity in detail. This study deconstructs authenticity into three components – object-related, intra-personal, and inter-personal – and then constructs a complete model by exploring each component’s internal structures, asking to what extent travel motivation is an antecedent and loyalty, a consequence. Data were obtained from 1,088 valid survey questionnaires distributed in Pingxi, Taiwan. Study findings confirmed the reliability and validity of the items used to measure the construct of authenticity. Regarding the internal structure of authenticity, intra-personal authenticity plays a mediating role between object-related authenticity and inter-personal authenticity, and this inter-personal authenticity may be the final value that tourists perceive. Compared with recent related studies, this model more comprehensively explains the degree of variation in loyalty, reflecting its importance for heritage tourism management and marketing. If a destination remains authentic, tourists are willing make a return visit. Authenticity may enable tourism managers to strike a balance between preservation and development when achieving the long-term goal of sustainable development.     

Rethinking authenticity in tourism experience

This paper aims at a conceptual clarification of the meanings of authenticity in tourist experiences. Three approaches are discussed, objectivism, constructivism, and postmodernism, and the limits of object-related authenticity are also exposed. It is suggested that existential authenticity is an alternative source in tourism, regardless of whether the toured objects are authentic. This concept is further classified into two different dimensions: intra-personal and inter-personal. This demonstrates that existential authenticity can explain a greater variety of tourist experiences, and hence helps enhance the explanatory power of the authenticity-seeking model in tourism.     

An existential conceptualization of the vacation cycle

Utilizing the notions of existential authenticity and normal anxiety, we propose the five-phase model of vacation cycle and elucidate mechanisms behind vacation and fade-out effects. Departing from a purely philosophical view on existential authenticity, we focus on its understanding via the existential psychology lenses, arguing that existential authenticity is a relative, dynamic, and four-dimensional concept. Supported by the current empirical evidences and theoretical advancements in existential psychology, this study posits that, accompanied by anxiety fluctuations, authenticity varies during a vacation across four dimensions of human existence: Umwelt, Mitwelt, Eigenwelt, and Uberwelt. We suggest that these changes are associated with vacation (when evoked by liminality and awe) and fade-out effects (when prompted by the lack of existential courage and anxiety tranquilization).     

Affective learning in short-term educational travel abroad: An exploratory mixed-method study

Employing an exploratory mixed-method approach, this research explores young adults' affective learning outcomes derived from their short-term educational travel abroad experiences. Different from previous travel research mostly focusing on the educational benefits of cognitive knowledge and technical skills, the current research highlights the prominent effect of educational travel on young adults' personal growth and attitudinal/emotional development by investigating the understudied domain of affective learning and how it manifests among college students having short-term study abroad experiences. Through a systematic review and a follow-up survey-based comparison study, five salient affective learning variables were identified—perspectives on global interdependence, intercultural attitudes, openness to diversity and challenge, environmental attitudes, and general self-efficacy. Furthermore, this research found that travelers’ lower-order affective learning shows significant progress after the short-term educational overseas travel. This study contributes to a niche topic in tourism research and provides implications to promote educational travel as an effective transformative learning approach.     

从建构主义真实性看文学资源的旅游开发——以界首镇“汪曾祺水乡风俗园”项目策划为例

真实性是现代旅游中的重要概念.本文对比了学术界有关真实性的4种理论,认为兼顾旅游客体和旅游体验真实性的建构主义真实性理论符合文学资源亦真亦幻的特点,适宜作为文学资源旅游开发的基础,并以高邮界首镇汪曾祺水乡风俗因项目策划为例,说明基于建构主义真实性理论的文学资源旅游开发流程.     

A structural model of host authenticity

Authenticity is significant for all modern peoples, including hosts. Hosts have the right to make their own interpretation of authenticity. The model that we constructed explains the process of hosts’ authentication through structural analysis of the antecedents and consequences of hosts’ authentic experiences. The effects of personal economic benefits are indirect and hidden, with personal emotional benefits being the key factor that mediates the conflict between economic benefits and authenticity. The model explains the complex but delicate mechanism of how hosts balance their dual demands, ‘benefits from tourism’ and ‘authentic culture’. When hosts use support for tourism as power to obtain hegemony over authenticity, they focus only on objective authenticity, which also implies ethnic tourism has become superficial in China.     

Signaling authenticity of ethnic cuisines via handwriting

Ethnic cuisines have become increasingly popular among travelers. Given people's demand for authenticity in ethnic dining, this research proposes and examines handwriting as a menu presentation strategy that boosts perceived authenticity of menu offerings and in turn enhances purchase intention. To that end, we utilize a mixed-methods approach and investigate the joint effects of menu format (handwriting vs. print) and regulatory focus (promotion vs. prevention) in the context of ethnic dining. Based on qualitative and quantitative data, we show that ethnic restaurants using a handwritten (vs. printed) menu may enhance perceived authenticity and subsequently elevate purchase intention. However, such beneficial effects of handwriting only occur among prevention-focused customers, but not promotion-focused customers. Managerial implications for ethnic restaurant operators are discussed.