Main destination ratios : Analyses of tourist flows

Published data such as those from the World Tourism Organisation omit statistics about multidestination trips. The main Destination Ratio and its derivatives provide a partial remedy, illuminating patterns and trends that otherwise may be hidden. The techniques are illustrated by data about trips in one year by Japanese, New Zealanders, and Australians to sixteen countries, and about Australians' visits over thirteen years to Singapore and Hong Kong. The techniques' distinction is data collected at two points in a tourism system; conventional statistics about traveler-tourist flows usually rely on one point. Practical applications of the new techniques are discussed.     

Thailand as a tourist destination: Perceptions of international visitors and Thai residents

In the tourism industry, the perceptions of a tourist destination are critical to its image. Image can be either a mental image of a product created by a marketing department or an associative image of a product that is developed by the consumer. Tourism destinations must be careful about their image so the perception that they have is not different from the way that they are perceived by potential travelers. This study examines the perceptions of international visitors and Thai residents on the image of Thailand as a tourist destination. International visitors and Thai residents were both surveyed to determine their perceptions of the image of Thailand. Some results of the study found that Thai residents and international visitors felt cultural sightseeing, friendly people and food were significantly important when thinking of Thailand as a tourist destination, while international visitors felt that nightlife and entertainment were significantly more important than that of Thai residents.     

Dimentions of tourist satisfaction with a destination area

Pizam, Abraham, Yoram Neumann, and Arie Reichel.. “Dimensions of Tourist Satisfaction with a Destination Area,” Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. V, No. 3, July/September 1978, pp. 314–322. This paper empirically identifies eight factors of tourist satisfaction with Cape Cod, Massachusetts (USA) as a tourist destination area; and it suggests the means to measure them. By using a factor-analytic approach based on data obtained from a survey of 685 vacationing tourist, the following factors of tourist satisfaction were derived: beach oppurtunities, cost, hospitality, eating and drinking facilities, accommodation facilities, environment, and extent of commercialization.     

Visitor responses to the changing character of the visual landscape as an agrarian area becomes a tourist destination: Yilan County,Taiwan

The development of rural tourism and tourism to protected areas relies heavily on visitors' appreciation of scenery. This paper assesses visitor responses to Taiwan's changing rural landscapes, which have experienced agricultural decline, and a government-aided shift to rural tourism, with landscapes rapidly transformed from farm production scenery to recreation-oriented scenery. The study describes the changing character of the visual landscape characteristics of the Dongshan River Basin in Yilan County, and the influence of those changes on visitors' landscape preferences. Using a recognized nine landscape characteristics typology, survey results indicated participants believed that agricultural landscapes represented the qualities of historicity, naturalness and ephemera more than tourist landscapes, but showed fewer qualities of stewardship, disturbance and visual scale than tourist landscapes. Participants did not perceive the two types of landscapes differently for their qualities of coherence, imageability and complexity. They also preferred tourist landscapes to agricultural landscapes. For agricultural landscapes, when the qualities of ephemera, coherence, imageability, complexity, visual scale, stewardship, naturalness and historicity increased, participants appreciated the landscapes more. However, as the quality of disturbance increased, participants appreciated both landscapes less. Overall, when ephemera, coherence, imageability, complexity, visual scale, stewardship and naturalness increased, participants liked the landscapes more.     

Investigating tourist destination choice: Effect of destination image from social network members

This paper aims to investigate tourist destination choice, focusing on the research question how and to what extent the destination images of tourists' social network members influence their choice behavior. To this end, data were collected using a sequential stated adaptation choice experiment, in which respondents were requested to choose a tourist destination from a single choice set twice, once before and once after being informed about the destination image of social network members. A discrete choice model was estimated to investigate tourists’ choices. The estimation results revealed that the destination image of social network members allow tourists to update their existing knowledge toward destinations, through which their choice behavior is influenced. Tourists tend to adopt their destination image of social network members no matter whether they have a prior image or not. The magnitude of this social influence depends on the properties of the social networks.     

The implications of differing tourist/resident perceptions for community-based resource management: a Hawaiian coastal resource area study

Despite globally increasing interest in restoring local-level management of natural resources, few studies examine differences between residents’ and tourists’ place connections and implications for community-based natural resource management. This article reports findings from a survey (n = 264) in Haena, Kauai, Hawaii, where resource management is shifting from state-level government to local residents. Tasked with creating new, local-level rules governing use of coastal resources, Haena community members must consider the perspectives, resource use, and values of residents as well as of multiple, diverse user groups including the burgeoning tourist population. We found significant differences in how residents and tourists learn about the area; the activities in which they engage; their perceptions of resource health; who they think is responsible for caretaking of resources; and their views of personal responsibilities to the place. The findings have implications for local-level resource management and use of popular tourist destinations including the importance of guidebooks in mediating visitor perceptions of a place, the possibility of concurrent but separate visitor and resident use of the same area, visitors’ and residents’ sense of responsibility to mitigate impacts of their actions, and the potential of engaging residents’ place caretaking preferences toward more organized community-based resource management efforts.     

Representation of online image of tourist destination: a content analysis of Huangshan

Online image of tourist destination has emerged as a crucial element in the construction of tourist destination image. The destination, along with the online tourism marketers, plays an increasingly significant role in forming online image of tourist destination. This study takes Huangshan as an example and collects photographic and textual information of Huangshan from its official online media and online tourism marketers. Built upon the semiotic theory, content analysis, and visual analysis are employed to explore the online image of Huangshan. The analysis comprises the coding manual formation, coding check, and formal encoding. The results indicate that online image of tourist destination of Huangshan is composed of three elements, that is, tourism resources, tourism facilities, and tourism services, which further comprise several secondary elements. Different information sources with different demonstration focuses of online image of tourist destination elements are different. Consistency tendency is in common among the demonstration of online image of tourist destination elements in different media forms.     

Influence of celebrity involvement on place attachment: role of destination image in film tourism

The importance of place attachment in film tourism has been recognized by scholars and practitioners. However, despite its predominance in the destination management industry, several unaddressed issues remain in film tourism. Therefore, this study is conducted to investigate the relationships between celebrity involvement, destination image, and place attachment. Data obtained from 301 purposeful film tourists indicated that celebrity involvement was positively associated with place attachment. Moreover, cognitive image and affective image partially mediated the relationship between celebrity involvement and place attachment. In other words, cognitive image and affective image represent crucial psychological processes that explain how celebrity involvement influences place attachment. Furthermore, compared with the affective image, the cognitive image had a more crucial mediating role in the celebrity fan–film destination attachment relationship. Theoretical and managerial implications are also provided.     

Governmentality and surf tourism destination governance

Abstract

Surf resources are critical to thousands of coastal communities as the natural resource base for many tourism services that spur development. There is, however, almost a total lack of formal surf-break management around the world, despite many surf resources becoming crowded, which leads to nuanced resource conflicts with social, economic and environmental implications. Managerial approaches and surf research, we argue, could become more effective by incorporating a nuanced understanding of the scales and process that govern behavior in surf tourism. This conceptual article first applies tourism destination governance (TDG) to outline the many stakeholders and scalar dimensions involved in governing surf tourism. To expand this normative analysis, Foucault’s governmentality framework is used to discuss different informal governance regimes (sovereign, disciplinary, and neoliberal) that conduct behavior at surf-breaks. The intersection of TDG and typologies of governmentality then help to discuss empirical cases demonstrating how governmentalities operating both at the surf-break and at wider scales, often overlap to either reinforce one another and powerfully condition behavior or compete and make governance ineffectual. This elaboration of surf tourism destination governance (STDG) opens up a new research agenda for surf tourism scholarship also applicable to other forms of tourism dependent upon contested natural resources.     

Synergy and congestion in the tourist destination life cycle

Discussion of agglomeration and clustering in the tourist area life cycle (TALC) literature has not led to a corresponding change of the principal equation used to formalize the model. This paper proposes a modification that accounts for the synergies between the accommodation, entertainment, and other components of a tourist destination. The modified model is contrasted with the original TALC and estimated for a cross-section of Caribbean and other island destinations. Estimations based on visitor expenditures and experts' evaluations of destination authenticity are compared. The results illustrate how parameters representing synergy and congestion vary across tourism styles and time. The implications for destination growth are illustrated by comparing the solution to the proposed model with the TALC. The model exposes a core dilemma that while destinations should realize positive synergies to achieve self-sustaining growth, with this threshold achieved, the resulting pace of investment may drive destinations to overshoot, and uneven growth.     

The framework of tourism : Towards a definition of tourism, tourist, and the tourist industry

Leiper, Neil, “The Framework of Tourism: Towards a Definition of Tourism, Tourist, and the Tourist Industry,” Annals of Tourism Research, 1979, VI(4):390–407. A framework for the general study of tourism is discussed. Three approaches to the topic: economic, technical, and holistic are identified and analysed; it is argued that its multi facets require a holistic definition. A systems methodology is used to develop a new definition of tourism. Five elements are isolated: tourists, three geographical elements (generating region, transit route, and destination region), and a tourist industry. The process of tourism is dissected to show that it is inherently a partially-industrialized one, and the tourist industry is shown to contain several sectors with functional and spatial connections across the system. Suggested applications of the framework are proposed, in academic research, education, business and government arenas of tourism. The main theme is that tourism's many facets are connected and that it is both possible and desirable to include an explicit recognition of those connections in general studies of the subject.

Résumé

Leiper, Neil, “Le Cadre théorique du tourisme: Pour une définition du tourisme, du touriste, et de l'industrie touristique,” Annals of Tourism Research, octobre/decembre 1979, VI(4):390–407. On discute un cadre théorique pour l'étude générale du tourisme. On présente et analyse trois façons d'aborder le sujet: économique, technique et globale, et on propose que l'aspect multi-dimensionnel du tourisme du tourisme fait que le tourisme exige une définition globale. On emploie une méthodologie de systémes pour développer une nouvelle définition pour le tourisme. On réussit á isoler cinq éléments: touristes, industrie touristique, région génératrice, route de passage, et région de destination, ces trois derniers formant les éléments géographiques. On disséque le processus du tourisme pour montrer qu'il est fondamentalement mi-industrialisé. On montre que l'industrie touristique comprend plusieurs secteurs, avec des liaisons fonctionnelles et spatiales á travers le systéme. On propose des applications de ce cadre dans les domaines suivants du tourisme: recherche universitaire, éducation, affaires et gouvernement. Enfin, la thése de cet article est que les divers aspects du tourisme sont reliés et qu'il est á la fois possible et désirable de reconnaître ces liaisons d'une facon explicite dans les études générales du sujet.     

The destination competitiveness of Kinmen's tourism industry: exploring the interrelationships between tourist perceptions,service performance,customer satisfaction and sustainable tourism

Based upon an empirical investigation, the study draws upon the responses of 1623 tourists in Kinmen to explore the notion of destination competitiveness and how it is related to customer satisfaction with tourists’ perceptions, service performance and destination competitiveness. It also considers the question of destination competitiveness and sustainable tourism development. Variables such as tourists’ pre-visit perceptions, post-visit satisfaction toward destination attractions and resources, willingness to recommend and revisit, and competitiveness with foreign destinations are tested. The results of the study suggest that there is no correlation between tourists’ overall satisfaction and destination competitiveness. Implications of the study outcome illustrate that a destination's unique tourism characteristics can be the most important variables for destination competitiveness. In Kinmen's case, battlefields, historic relics, beautiful scenery and travel security gave it a competitive edge, despite high prices. In addition, developing the destination's brand image was found to be critical for tourism marketers and authorities in the context of increasingly global tourism competition.     

Dental tourism: Examining tourist profiles,motivation and satisfaction

Despite the overwhelming interest in medical tourism research, knowledge in dental tourism, which is its subspecialty, remains limited. This study is the first to measure tourist profiles, travel motivation and satisfaction among inbound dental tourists in Malaysia. We purposely sampled twelve selected private dental clinics in Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, Melaka and Penang; and distributed the questionnaires to their inbound dental tourists. A total of 196 inbound tourists responded to the questionnaire, mainly from Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. In order of importance, the main motivation factors were dental care quality, dental care information access, and cost-savings. Tourists were extremely satisfied with dental care services received in the country. While dental care quality, dental care information access and supporting services positively influenced tourist satisfaction; cost-savings and cultural similarities had negative influences. Based on the research findings, we propose some managerial and marketing recommendations.     

Visiting probability model: a new method for tourist volume forecasting

ABSTRACT

Tourist volume forecasting is an ongoing theme in tourism research. Current methods rely too much on the previous tourist arrivals data. Based on tourism system perspective, we propose a visiting probability model composed of five independent variables: the attractiveness of a destination, the travel time from a origin to the destination, the traffic expense to and from the destination, the physical fatigue travel time and the per capita disposable monthly income of the origin. The model provides a new method for forecasting the number of tourists from a specific origin without historical tourist arrivals data.     

Off-season tourists and the cultural offer of a mass-tourism destination: The case of Rimini

This paper assesses the potential implications on off-season tourism of enhancing the cultural offer of Rimini, a popular Italian seaside holiday destination hosting about 12 million overnight stays per year. Since more than 9 million of these stays are concentrated in the summer season, in the last 20 years. Rimini has been undergoing a policy of seasonality smoothing, which mainly pivots around business and cultural tourism. This assessment has been carried out through discrete choice experiments submitted to a sample of about 800 tourists who visited Rimini outside the summer months. Since tourism can be viewed as a composite good, which overall utility depends on how the component characteristics are arranged, the choice experiments allow to disentangle the importance and the willingness to pay of tourists for different attributes of the holiday. The choice model incorporates a number of possible changes to actual tourism features (which are also the subject of public debate), including them in hypothetical alternative “holiday packages”. The conditional logit analysis of the choice experiments can highlight any synergy or trade-off between cultural and business tourism. Results suggest that business and leisure tourists share many features related to the use of the territory, while there are important trade-offs between these two groups and cultural tourists. Since business tourists have a higher willingness to extend their stay, a softer budget, and their demand is also complementary to the demand of summer tourists (Brau, Scorcu, & Vici, 2009), from the destination point of view investing in this market segment would be the best option. Although a “second best”, however, cultural tourists share with the local population of Rimini many aspects of the demand of territory (Figini, Castellani, & Vici, 2009). Hence, cultural tourism can play a fundamental role in the intermediate season as a tool for smoothing seasonality, to diversify investments and to give value to the city’s cultural heritage.     

Gay tourism in a sun and beach destination

Gay tourism is seen as an attractive business opportunity for many destinations. However, there is a lack of research at identifying the resources necessary for success in this type of tourism. This work is aimed at filling this gap by using the premises of the resource based view and transfers them to the analysis of territories to identify the valuable resources that are required for a sun and beach destination to attract gay tourists. To this end, this study has focused on a gay tourism sub niche, tourists lodged in gay-exclusive resorts in Gran Canaria. In order to confirm the validity of this approach, the relationship between the satisfaction of gay tourists and the condition of the valuable resources was studied by means of a robust statistical new method, namely Bayesian model averaging. That method permits the inclusion of uncertainty in the theoretical models that determine destination competitiveness, thus reducing many of the problems that arise in the application of the more conventional statistical methods in this type of analysis.     

Residents,their use of a tourist facility and contribution to tourist ambience: Narratives from a film tourism site in Beijing

Any tourist site open to local residents represents a point where residents and tourists become a back drop for the experiences of the other. This paper examines a specific Beijing film tourism attraction, Grand View Gardens, and the manner in which the site is used by local residents, the meanings attributed to it, and residents' role in creating an ambience for tourists. Residents have a daily connection with the site, and form audiences for events held at the Gardens. They often interact with tourists, becoming a source of information for tourists. The paper examines residents' motives for using such attractions, their attitudes towards tourists and suggests they possess a role in the creation of a sense of place that is valued by tourists. The paper fills a gap in an under-researched area, where, in the Chinese context, both residents and visitors form backdrops to each other's experience of place.     

Empirical verification of a conceptual model of local food consumption at a tourist destination

This study empirically tests a conceptual model of local food consumption proposed by Kim et al. (2009) and examines relationships among the key factors found in the model. This study quantitatively identified factors affecting local food consumption: five motivations (cultural experience, interpersonal relationship, excitement, health concern, and sensory appeal); food-related personality traits (food neophobia and food involvement); and ‘demographic factors’ (i.e., gender, age, and annual income) and their relationships. This study showed that demographic variables (gender and age) were related to some motivational factors and significant differences in the FNG associated with gender, age and income.     

Tourism destination decisions: the impact of risk aversion and prior experience

This study broadly explores the impact of risk aversion on tourists' destination decisions and, in particular, explores for differences in individuals' leisure and medical tourism destination decisions. The results of this study indicate that risk aversion significantly distinguishes tourists' destination decisions in both leisure and medical tourism in Indonesia, but not in Singapore. All risk-averse groups are less likely to visit Indonesia than Singapore for leisure and medical purposes. By contrast, all risk-averse groups are likely to visit Singapore for leisure purposes, although they remain unlikely to travel to Singapore for medical tourism. In addition, the study found that the impact of prior experience on the likelihood that the two risk-averse groups will travel to Indonesia and Singapore for leisure was significant. Conversely, the effects of prior experience on medical tourism generally do not significantly differ between the two countries.