LETTER FROM THE GUEST EDITOR

ABSTRACT

Research was undertaken to gain a better understanding of the nature and competitive importance of bidding on events by destination marketing organizations, with emphasis on identifying event selection criteria and critical success factors for winning bids. Data were collected on the goals and nature of the event bidding process from convention and visitor bureaus in Canada. Canadian bureaus were found to be very active in bidding on a diverse range of events, especially meetings, conventions, political events, and sports. Most bureaus encouraged and assisted other local organizations to make bids and themselves concentrated on major events with city-wide economic impacts. Although event selection criteria were frequently not formalized, respondents stressed potential economic impacts, size, media exposure, time of year, available venues, and local involvement. The most important critical success factors for winning bids were strong partners, excellent presentations, and treating each bid as a unique process, but many respondents also felt their destination needed bigger and better facilities and more marketing/bidding resources. To aid in future research and theory-building, a framework is presented to illustrate event bidding as an exchange process between owners and sellers, including antecedent conditions and event selection criteria.     

FROM THE EDITOR

Abstract

Thailand has some of the finest conference venues in Southeast Asia, and the convention/exhibition industry is important to the development of the nation's overall tourism industry. The convention/exhibition industry is good for the tourism industry, because it helps to enhance the quality of accommodations, hospitality, and services that are located in such an exotic location. Also, it stimulates the convention/exhibition industry investment in terms of associated facilities and services. An analysis of the performance of the convention and exhibition industry in 1996 and 1997 was conducted in this paper. The results solidly suggest that Thailand has a strong convention and exhibition industry which should produce substantial economic impact in the years ahead. Recommendations for future research are also provided.     

Change in Consumer Patronage and Willingness to Pay at Different Levels of Service Attributes in Restaurants: A Study in India

Consumer patronage and consumer willingness to pay are the two most important criteria for business development. The current study investigates the changing preferences of consumers in a developing economy with respect to three major service attributes from the restaurant industry: food quality, service, and ambiance. Results indicated that consumers give greater preference to quality over service in high-end restaurants and prefer service compared with ambiance in quick-service restaurants. Food quality was found to have strong interaction effect with two other variables. When food quality was improved from low to high, consumer preferences for ambiance and service tended to change accordingly in the same direction, but not necessarily at the same level. Thus, restaurateurs have a strategic advantage when they choose high quality food and an appropriate level of service or ambiance. Consumer expectations are significantly different for high-end, full-service restaurants and quick-service restaurants in service attributes.     

Predicting Hotel Choice Decisions and Segmenting Hotel Consumers: A Comparative Assessment of a Recent Consumer Based Approach

Abstract

Given the intensified competition to attract today's increasingly discerning hotel guests, it is vital for hotel managers to understand the set or bundle of hotel attributes which are demanded by the potential traveler. Unfortunately, marketing research in hotels is still mainly confined to the analysis of guest-related data collected during registration or from guest comment cards. These data, however, have little merit as predictors of customer behaviour and cannot answer the “what if” questions. In recent and past research in hospitality and tourism, researchers have demonstrated the use of product attributes in predicting consumer preferences and segmenting markets (Bell and Morey 1997; Kim 1996). In undertaking this approach to behavioral study, many researchers in the field have been attracted to use conjoint attribute part-worths, (the judgmentally quantified attribute valuesderived from conjoint modeling. This study attempts to utilize the compositional self-explication model as a reference model to assess the comparative superiority of the conjoint model in predicting client preferences among travelers to Hong Kong. It also seeks to reveal subgroup preference variations by using two segmentation approaches. The overall finding indicated that the most important hotel attribute sought by all respondents is Room Rate, followed by Star Rating, Location, Brand and Room Type. In terms of market segments, the results revealed similar preference profiles among leisure, short-haul and infrequent travelers as one group and business, long-haul and frequent travelers as another.     

Celebration of heritage: linkages between historical re-enactment festival attributes and attendees’ value perception

ABSTRACT

Community-based festivals celebrate a sense of community and place. Communities across the United States (US) and elsewhere have turned to various community-based events to celebrate local heritage and culture. This study investigates the relationship between the attributes of a historical re-enactment festival and participants’ perceived value. Drawing on means–end theory and event experience literature, we examined event attributes, perceived benefits, and attendees’ perceived value in the context of a historical re-enactment festival in the Midwestern US. The results highlighted the importance of four attributes of historical re-enactment festivals, namely historical re-enactment, social interactions, event design, and physical facets. Each factor contributed differently to attendees’ perceived value of such a festival experience. In addition, perceived benefits of attending such an event mediated the relationships between event attributes and perceived value. Theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are discussed.     

FRAMING TOURISM GEOGRAPHY: NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

Tourism geography is a significant contributor to the study of tourism, yet is generally perceived as marginal to geography. The review frames contemporary tourism geography by examining it in the context of geographical knowledge processes, changes to the environment within which it is situated, issues of marginality, and the ongoing significance of major binaries in geographic thought including physical/human geography and applied/theoretical geography. These frames are relevant to the wider domain of tourism studies as well. Although noting the dangers of invented disciplinary traditions and heritage as a result of the writing of reflective reviews and texts, the article argues that tourism geography has been a significant contributor to the bringing together and hybridity of geographic binaries, especially in the development of more critical applied geographies of environmental change.     

THE TAIPEI MRT (MASS RAPID TRANSIT) TOURISM ATTRACTION ANALYSIS FROM THE INBOUND TOURISTS' PERSPECTIVES

Of all cities in Taiwan, Taipei is fully internationalized and best‐equipped with a completed metro public transit system. Taipei MRT Company is trying to increase the number of inbound tourists by providing a better travel experience and design different marketing strategies to increase better MRT tourism attraction. The study purposes are to investigate inbound tourists' considerations for choosing public means of transportation during their travel in Taipei City, conduct the tourism attraction analysis of Taipei MRT system from the perspectives of inbound tourists, and identify how inbound tourists' traveling behavior influence their perceptions of Taipei MRT tourism attractions. The study sampled 312 inbound tourists in August and September of 2006 by using a closed‐ended questionnaire. Factor analysis revealed five factors that can be attractive to inbound tourists: holistic, service, information, tourism image, and location attraction. The study result also indicated that inbound tourists with different socio‐economic characteristics, traveling behaviors, and different MRT experience have statistically different perceptions of Taipei MRT Tourism attractions.     

AN ANALYSIS OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN TOURISM JOURNALS FROM 2000 TO 2007: A GOOGLE SCHOLAR APPROACH

This research note reports a study that analyzed the 100 most influential articles, which is operationalized as the most cited publications published in tourism journals from 2000 to 2007. A Google Scholar‐based software system was developed in Java to retrieve the citation information. The empirical findings show that 10.16% of the citations were from Institute for Scientific Information‐listed (ISI) journals, and that 71.64% of them were from neither ISI nor tourism journals. The most popular topics covered by these articles were psychology and tourist behavior, followed by destination image and marketing. This article contributes to the literature by providing an alternative means of assessing the impact of research into tourism.