Eunju Woo

Motivation and Involvement as Antecedents of the Perceived Value of the Destination Experience

Research acknowledges the tourist as imperative in creating experience value. Building on this premise, the present study offers an integrated approach to understanding tourists’ experience values and attempts to extend the theoretical and empirical evidence of causal relationships between the motivation, involvement, and the experience value of the destination, hereafter called experience value. Using a sample drawn from tourists in Norway, the research model investigates relationships between the three constructs, using a structural equation modeling approach. The results indicate that motivation and involvement are linked to tourists’ experience value and motivation affects the level of involvement. In order to facilitate for tourists to cocreate experience value then, not only should the industry recognize experiences that tourists value but should also acknowledge motivation and involvement as essential in value creation for tourist experiences.

Experience value: antecedents and consequences

This article outlines and tests a holistic model of tourist experience that includes the effects of the antecedents and consequences of the perceived value of an on-site trip experience. Based on the literature and the results from the present research, this article develops a framework of perceived value experience and its antecedents, such as tourist motivation, involvement, and knowledge, and consequences, such as satisfaction and future intention, in terms of recommendations and repeat purchase. Structural equation modelling is applied to test the model. The results strongly support the notion that the constructs of motivation, involvement (to a lesser extent), and tourist knowledge serve as antecedents to the perceived value of a holiday experience, which influences the consequences of behaviour, such as satisfaction and loyalty.

Comparative research of motivations across different festival products

Purpose – The study has three objectives. The first objective of this paper is to investigate the underlying dimensions of motivation for attending an international festival in Turkey and whether motivation will vary across six different festival products (symphony, rock, world music, dance, ballet, and theater). The second purpose is to understand how festival attendees perceive the socio‐economic impacts of the festival and how these perceived impacts vary across different festival attendee groups. Finally, the study examines the overall satisfaction of festival attendees with respect to different festival products.Design/methodology/approach – The empirical data was collected by way of self‐administered questionnaires to obtain perceptions and motivations of 523 attendees in Eskisehir International Festival.Findings – The results showed that there were significant differences in motivation among attendees from six different festival products. Duncans multiple‐range tests were performed to further exam...

The Tourist Area Life Cycle (TALC) and Its Effect on the Quality-of-Life (QOL) of Destination Community

This chapter examines the connection between tourism area life cycle (TALC) and its effects on the quality-of-life (QOL) of destination communities. We posit that as destinations go through structural changes over time, the extent to which the dynamics of change affect the QOL of the resident community varies with the stages of the life cycle. The chapter consists of four major sections. After a brief introduction, the first section presents the concept of TALC and describes the development phases and the indicators that help understand tourism area development. The second section provides a brief discussion on the impact of tourism on the community in relation to TALC, which is then followed by the third section which focuses on the adjustment to change and maintaining the QOL of the community. Section four reviews related literature to support the relation between TALC and QOL of communities. The chapter ends with delineating critical issues for future research, outlining some of the difficulties moving forward, and formulating relevant policy implications that may help the researchers and destination management organizations to further examine the issues that may surround TALC and QOL connections.

Towards Assessing the Knowledge Gap in Medical Tourism

The medical tourism industry is a fast growing global niche market that generated

Tourism Impact and Stakeholders’ Quality of Life:

20 billion in income for destinations around the world. This study suggests and tests a mechanism to assess the medical tourism providers’ perceptions about the tourists’ perceived important product attributes when selecting a medical tourism destination. The results indicate that the various medical tourism providers groups do not vary in their perceptions regarding 24 important attributes of the medical tourism product and that they all agree that tourists perceive the medical variables to be more important than the tourism related variables. Using the Korean market for data collection, the study’s additional contribution is providing insights for Korean government agencies, operators of medical tourism hospitals, policymakers, and marketers.

Quality of life (QOL) and well-being research in tourism

This article reports a study testing the hypothesis that, compared with community residents who are not affiliated with the tourism industry, residents affiliated with tourism are likely to perceive tourism impact more positively, and the more positive their perceptions of tourism development, the more likely they feel satisfied with their lives. The study involved a survey of community residents of four tourist destinations in the United States. A total of 407 responses were used for data analysis. The results provided support for the notion that the influence of community residents’ perceptions of tourism impact and their life satisfaction is dependent on whether the residents are affiliated or not affiliated with the tourism sector.