Marginal economic impacts of inbound tourism to Taiwan and policy evaluation†

This paper presents the economic impact estimation for international visitors to Taiwan using an Input–Output Model to demonstrate the differences of economic contribution by market segments. Economic impacts are compared based on visitor segments by country of residence and travel purpose. The results indicated that high spenders contributed two to three times more expenses in Taiwan than low spenders. In 2000–2001, excluding airfares, business visitors from North America (US$1,360), Japanese sightseers (US$1,323) and Singapore/Malaysia sightseers (US$1098) were the top three segments in terms of per person per trip expenditure, whereas tourists from Korea with a purpose of visiting friends and relatives spent approximately US$314 per party per trip. Type I multipliers on sales, personal income and value added were similar across all visitor segments. Type I jobs to sales multiplier, however, had stronger variation by segments, depending on the relative composition of different items/services that visitors consumed during the trip. Policy implications are proposed for the Taiwan national tourism policy, “Doubling Tourist Arrivals Plan”, which aimed to increase inbound tourism from 2.7 million person visits in 2002 to 5 million person visits by 2008. It is suggested that multiple indicators, such as length of stay, segment shares, and daily spending by individual visitor segments, should be concurrently incorporated in the policy formulation and evaluation process. Relying on one measurement objective, such as 5 million yearly visits, is inadequate in determining the overall achievement and efficiency of tourism policies.     

Analyzing tourists’ length of stay at destinations with survival models: A constructive critique based on a case study

The statistical modeling of tourists’ length of stay at destinations is a topic that recently has received much attention from tourism scholars. In this regard, so-called “survival models” have been introduced as a means of studying how a set of independent variables explain variation in the number of days tourists spend at destinations. This paper provides a critical look at these studies. There are two main findings. (1) The various justifications offered for favoring the survival models over the traditional OLS regression do not hold up under closer scrutiny. (2) An empirical study shows that the OLS regression model describes the association between a set of independent variables and length of stay at least as effectively as a battery of survival models. In line with the principle of parsimony it is concluded that future studies on tourists’ length of stay should abandon survival models if they are conducted along similar lines as the ones to date.     

Move fast,travel slow: the influence of high-speed rail on tourism in Taiwan

High-speed rail (HSR) and tourism are closely related economic activities because improved mobility is perceived to facilitate tourist behavioral changes. This study examines the influence of HSR on the travel patterns of individual tourists in Taiwan in relation to time, space and carbon emissions. A framework is first provided to discuss how changes in the speed of intercity transportation will affect visitors’ choice of the journey, behavior at destinations and trip quality. In addition, HSR is expected to influence five general aspects of travel decisions relating to mobility and trip emissions, including mode selection, travel distance, length of stay per trip, annual travel frequency and total travel days. In the example of Taiwan, information by onsite sampling of 400 domestic travelers found that HSR had a weak influence on travel distance and length of stay per trip, but was observed to facilitate extended time at each stop, a deeper engagement with the locality, and an approximate 10% reduction in transport carbon emissions through intermodal substitution. These phenomena are in line with the slow travel concept of sustainable tourism consumption.     

Can Marine Wildlife Tourism Provide an “Edutaining” Experience?

Marine-based tourism can be both an entertaining and educational experience for tourists – “edutainment”. This research surveys participants of a dolphin watching program in Fiji to assess their motives to participate in dolphin watching. The research also examines the extent to which education and enjoyment of the marine wildlife tourism experience can contribute to intended pro-environmental behavior. The study reveals there is moderate evidence to support the hypothesis. Although the educational aspect of the trip was limited, satisfaction with the experience was high. However, there is an opportunity for increased education and interpretation in the context of the experience.     

Package and no-frills air carriers as moderators of length of stay

This article analyses the determinants of length of stay among inbound tourists arriving by air in one of the world's most popular tourist countries, Spain. Special emphasis is placed on the effects of whether tourists booked the trip themselves or as part of a package and whether they travelled by low cost (LCA) or legacy airline. An ordered logit model is estimated. Relevant explanatory variables are related to tourist preferences and characteristics, trip characteristics, stay characteristics, and activities at destination. One of the main relevant results concerns the moderating effects. For instance, length of stay among package travellers is most affected by type of destination (city vs. coast), length of LCA trip by age, and length of legacy airline trip by accommodation type.     

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.     

Cognition of disaster risk in a tourism community: an agricultural heritage system perspective

Cognition of risk is the first step in reducing disaster damage and losses. In this study, risk cognition in the Hani Rice Terraces, the core tourism attraction in Yuanyang County, Honghe Prefecture, Yunnan, China, is analyzed based on field survey and participatory geographic information system (GIS). The results show that tourism communities have cognition of risk; are more sensitive to hazards (especially drought); have more severe potential damage and losses from hazards; and also have more enthusiasm to adapt to disaster risk, when compared with a non-tourism community. On disaster vulnerability maps, the tourism communities identified the unique “Forest – Village – Terrace - River” landscape while the non-tourism community only recognized the terrace and the village as the main elements affected by hazard. Also, the tourism communities had deeper understandings of drought, flash floods and landslide disaster risks. A conceptual model based on “Pressure – State – Response” relationships is put forward to explore the situation in which, in the tourism community, terraces have a greater variety of functions and enhanced values resulting in the spatial expansion of hazard effects.     

Geography of taste and local development in Abruzzo (Italy): project to establish a training and research centre for the promotion of enogastronomic culture and tourism

Food is not merely a source of nourishment but also one of survival for human beings. Depending on production methods, food can also become a cultural reference point, an element of regional development and a tourist resource. This occurs with “local” food, representing a model of production and consumption that suggests a strong link with the region in which the food is produced. Over the last few years, the field of geographical studies has seen the rise of a specialised branch – the geography of taste – concerned with the study of links between the production of food, seen as a phenomenon of organisation of production, and the territory of reference. The production of food with these qualitative characteristics engages all five senses, assumes cultural significance and thus represents an element of emotional richness – the “gaze” – capable of being transformed into the tourist attraction defined in this paper as the “taste of geography”. These phenomena have been studied in a region of Italy – Abruzzo – in order to obtain the necessary data to plan a training and research centre for the promotion of enogastronomic culture and tourism.     

Family Vs. Non-Family Business Owners’ Commitment to Their Town: A Multigroup Invariance Analysis

This study examines differences between family-owned and non-family-owned small and medium tourism enterprises (SMTEs) operating in regional tourism destinations. The research focuses on SMTE owners' commitment to stay in the town in which they are embedded. Based on samples of family (N?=?157) and non-family (N?=?141) businesses in regional South Australia, was used to test the construct validity of SMTE owners' “commitment to stay”. Multigroup invariance was used to test the factorial equivalence of scores from the commitment model across family and non-family businesses. Results support the validity of the “commitment to stay” CFA model. Multigroup invariance analysis suggests family business owners have a greater commitment to staying in their town. These results contribute to our understanding of the unique objectives and behaviours of family businesses in tourism as well as present important implications to destination managers aiming to support sustainable entrepreneurial development.     

Mental mapping and heritage visitors’ spatial perceptions

Visitors’ activities tend to be spatially oriented in destinations. Mental mapping is a useful method for revealing how visitors spatially perceive tourism destinations. However, studies of this kind are under-researched in the tourism field. Therefore, this study investigates the ways in which visitors spatially perceive the World Heritage Sites (WHSs) of Macau through the use of mental maps drawn by a sample of 400 respondents. Comparisons of the mental maps revealed that respondents possessed a relatively limited spatial knowledge of the WHSs, and this recognition varied according to the gender, place of origin, travel mode, type of trip, social interaction with local people and length of stay. While the real-life world of visitors was identified by the mental mapping approach, some suggestions for formulating strategies are provided.     

The Determinants of the Travel Demand on International Tourist Arrivals to Thailand

The purpose of this study is to develop a travel demand model of international tourist arrivals to Thailand and to assess the impact of crisis incidents on Thailand's tourism industry. A 20-year (1987–2006) annual time series data of “number of international tourist arrivals”, “exchange rate”, “promotion budget”, and dummy variables of “Asia financial crisis”, “special promotional campaigns”, “SARS” and “tsunami” were used to develop the travel demand model by performing a multiple regression analysis. The results showed that travel demand of international tourist arrivals to Thailand could be explained by “exchange rate”, “promotion budget”, “Asia financial crisis” and “SARS”.     

Residents’ place image: a meaningful psychographic variable for tourism segmentation?

ABSTRACT

While there has been a considerable body of research on tourists’ place image, there remains limited attention on residents’ place image, specifically, in relation to its segmentation utility. This study seeks to address this oversight by a) clustering the local residents based on the image held of a tourism place, and b) exploring the extent to which the identified image-based resident clusters share similar (dissimilar) demographic characteristics and attitude towards tourism development. Empirical analysis was based on a sample of 481 residents of a Greek city. The findings support the utility of residents’ place image as a psychographic segmentation variable revealing the existence of three distinct resident groups – termed “Nature Loving”, “Apathetic” and “Advocate.” Results also suggest that these resident groups exhibit dissimilar demographic characteristics and dissimilar attitude towards tourism. In comparison with other segments, the Apathetic exhibits the least favourable image and the least supportive attitude towards tourism.     

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.     

Factors Affecting the Adoption of E-commerce for the Tourism Industry in Taiwan

The tourism industry has successfully pioneered the adoption of e-commerce with respect to its online trading systems. Given the potential for the tourism industry to impart knowledge to other industries, this study examines the acceptance of online trading systems for travel agencies in Taiwan. According to the results of a literature review, this study uses six critical factors that were identified in the literature review as formative influences on the adoption of e-commerce. These factors are then incorporated into a questionnaire designed to verify empirically the extent of their ability to be generalized. This survey reveals that 80% of the travel agencies in the sample have adopted online trading systems. Particularly noteworthy is how the adopters and non-adopters hold different viewpoints on the following factors; “compatibility of adopting innovative technology”, “centralization of organization”, “organizational scale” and “correctness of website transmission”.     

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.     

Domestic tourism expenditures: The non-linear effects of length of stay and travel party size

The independent variables length of stay and travel party size are recurrent determinants of expenditures in micro level tourism studies. In most of this research it has been tacitly assumed that these variables have linear effects on tourism spending. This study, situated in a Norwegian setting, questions this approach by explicitly scrutinizing the possible non-linearities in the relationships between tourism expenditures on the one hand and length of stay and travel party size on the other. The empirical results suggest a positive but diminishing relationship between length of stay and tourism expenditures and a convex (i.e. U) relationship between travel party size and tourism expenditures. The study also considers how a number of other key independent variables affect tourism expenditures. Finally, some managerial and scholarly implications are discussed.     

Shopping experiences: International tourists in Beijing's Silk Market

This study examines international tourists' experiences in Beijing's Silk Market, one of the China's most well-known tourist markets. Tourists' spontaneous reviews on TripAdvisor were analyzed through Leximancer, a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software. The study confirms that markets can be major tourism attractions and can provide important experiences for international tourists. Most international tourists were impressed with their Silk Market trip. The dominant narratives of their experiences were the “price” of the items they “bought”, the “fun” of “bargaining”, and the “fake” quality of the products. Further analyses show that different satisfaction groups used somewhat different narratives to represent their shopping experiences and that male international tourists enjoyed the Silk Market experiences more than their female counterparts.     

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。     

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。     

The evolution of coastal tourism destinations: a path plasticity perspective on tourism urbanisation

Evolutionary and relational approaches to economic development are gaining ground in geography as a discipline, although in the subfield of tourism geography, their potential is only just becoming recognised. This article focuses on the evolution of mature tourism destinations, taking the path dependency concept forward from the notion of path creation into the new domain of path plasticity. Drawing on the notion of cultural political economy, we examine how tourism destinations can break with path dependency routines incrementally and move steadily towards different future paths, which may recast tourism in a different light in the overall “urban” context of the destination. Using a case study of a Mediterranean coastal destination on Catalonia's Costa Daurada, we explore the inter-tangled tourism and urban development processes in relation to the socio-spatial dimensions of urban change. The article argues for a wider range of social and cultural criteria in the analysis of tourism evolution – advocating the use of path plasticity and a cultural political economy approach – to offer an alternative perspective on shifting tourism situations, reflecting the inherently “urbanising” nature of tourism development in the traditional coastal resort context. It adds to the growing literature on governance and strategy-making in sustainable tourism.