Why Are International Visitors More Satisfied with the Tourism Experience? The Role of Hedonic Value,Escapism,and Psychic Distance

Abstract

Previous studies have consistently observed that international visitors are more satisfied with the tourism experience than their domestic counterparts. To date, however, no study has provided empirical evidence of the mechanism that could explain this phenomenon. Building on the experiential paradigm, we conducted two empirical studies (a field study and an online experiment) showing that the reason foreign (vs. domestic) visitors exhibit higher levels of satisfaction lies in the greater hedonic value that these tourists derive from their experience. Moreover, the greater hedonic value observed among international foreign visitors is due to the deeper feeling of escapism they experience by traveling abroad. We also demonstrate that this effect is explained by the concept of psychic distance, whereby going abroad leads to a greater perception of psychic distance, and subsequently escapism, hedonic value, and satisfaction with the tourism experience.

Keywords

international domestic hedonic value escapism psychic distance experience

Introduction

In the field of tourism, tourists are generally classified as domestic or international visitors (Ballantyne et al. 2014). Domestic tourists travel within the borders of their country of residence. In contrast, international tourists travel to and stay in places outside the usual environment of their country of residence (World Tourism Organization 2017). A range of studies has compared and contrasted domestic and international tourists on key attitudinal and behavioral dimensions, such as destination image formation, travel motivations, preferences, quality of service and experience, expenditure, satisfaction, and revisiting and patronage intentions (for details, see Table 1). The results of these studies overwhelmingly point to the existence of significant differences between domestic and international tourists on most of these dimensions. In particular, consistently observed across various destinations and attractions is that international visitors are more satisfied with their tourism experience than their domestic counterparts (e.g., Lee, Lee, and Wicks 2004; Simpson, Siguaw, and Sheng 2016).

Table 1.

Summary of Empirical Research Examining Differences between Domestic and International Tourists.

Topic / Dependent Variable(s)	Sample(s)	Destination(s)	Theory-Led Hypotheses?	Significant Differences?	Theoretical Explanation for the Results	Authors
Tourist behavior	Young, single, British tourists	Torquay (UK) and Mallorca (Spain).	No	Yes	Adoption of a tourist mindset	Carr (2002)
Shopping experience	Turkish and international visitors	Kusadai (Turkey)	No	Yes	Adoption of a tourist mindset	Yuksel (2004)
Visitor satisfaction	Korean and foreign visitors	Kyongju (South Korea)	No	Yes	Foreign tourists’ expectations	Lee, Lee, and Wicks (2004)
Destination image	Florida, US, and international residents	Tampa Bay, Florida (USA)	No	Yes	Cultural and nationalistic background	Bonn, Joseph, and Dai (2005)
Information available at destinations	Spanish and EU tourists	Spanish hotel sector	No	Yes	Cultural and nationalist background	Ortega and Rodriguez (2007)
Destination sustainability importance	Italian and international tourists	Bologna (Italy)	No	Yes	None	Sörensson and von Friedrichs (2013)
Motives, preferences and perceptions	Chinese and international visitors	Heritage sites in Beijing (China)	No	Yes	Cultural and nationalistic background	Ballantyne et al. (2014)
Use and perceptions of a heritage site	Beijing residents and Chinese tourists	Summer Palace in Beijing (China)	No	Yes (use) No (perceptions)	None	Su and Wall (2015)
Life satisfaction	Seasonal migrants	Rio Grande Valley of Texas (USA)	No	Yes	None	Simpson, Siguaw, and Sheng (2016)
Travel preferences and gaze	International and domestic tourists, and local residents	Botswana	No	Yes	Cultural background	Stone and Nyaupane (2019)
Pro-environmental intentions	Residents of Hangzhou and Chinese tourists	Natural parks in China	No	Yes	Perceptions of the environment as “usual” or “unusual”	Li and Wu (2019)
Destination image	Austrian and EU residents	Linz (Austria)	No	Yes	Cultural and nationalist background	Iordanova and Stylidis (2019)

These studies comparing domestic and international tourists have been conducted in various countries including the US, UK, China, and Austria among others. However, although France was the most visited country worldwide with 89.4 million international tourist arrivals in 2018,¹ no study has investigated whether international tourists are more satisfied with the tourism experience in this particular country. As a first step, we therefore undertook a pilot study to examine whether the difference between the satisfaction levels of international and domestic tourists replicates in this country, and more specifically, whether international tourists report more satisfying experiences than domestic ones. In this regard, from January 2019 onwards, we conducted a quarterly customer experience study at the Cité du Vin museum. This leading experience-centric cultural center located in Bordeaux offers a permanent exhibition, temporary exhibitions, tasting workshops, and numerous events. The Cité du Vin museum was chosen primarily because of its success in attracting international tourists, as evidenced by the 160,000 visitors (approx. 40% of all visitors) from 180 countries² welcomed in 2018. Throughout 2019, quarterly data were collected from a representative sample (N = 824) composed of 449 French (54.49%) and 375 international (45.51%) visitors who were interviewed by a researcher as they were leaving the center. Visitor satisfaction was measured on a single-item 10-point Likert-type scale taken from Oliver (1980) (“To what extent are you satisfied with your overall experience at the Cité du Vin museum today?”). Results of an independent-sample t-test revealed a significantly higher level of satisfaction among international visitors (M_{International} = 8.53, M_Domestic = 8.09, t = −5.22, p < .001), a finding fully aligned with previous literature.

This pilot study was an important first step in confirming the existence and relevance of the phenomenon in the French context, thus further increasing external validity. Although prior literature and the aforementioned pilot study emphasize a significant difference in how international and domestic tourists perceive and evaluate the tourism experience, to date no study has provided empirical evidence of the mechanism that could explain this phenomenon. Therefore, in this research, we propose, test, and support the notion that one reason that international (vs. domestic) tourists exhibit higher levels of satisfaction lies in the greater hedonic value that such tourists derive from their experience. Specifically, building on the experiential paradigm (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982), we find that greater hedonic value is observed among international tourists due to the deeper feeling of escapism they experience by traveling abroad. We also demonstrate that this effect is explained by the concept of psychic distance (Sousa and Bradley 2006), whereby holidaying abroad leads to a greater perception of psychic distance and, subsequently, escapism, hedonic value, and satisfaction with the tourism experience.

By investigating the issue of greater satisfaction among international (vs. domestic) visitors, and explaining the underlying mechanism of this phenomenon, this research is important for three reasons. First, the economic impact of domestic tourism is massive, and an important tool for regional economic growth and development (Ivanov and Webster 2007). In 2017, domestic tourism accounted for 73% of total global tourism expenditure, and domestic tourists outnumbered international tourists by approximately sixfold.³ In addition, countries derive a range of major benefits from domestic tourism, such as a reduction in spatial inequalities, seasonality effects, and leakages (Canavan 2012). National tourism is also considered less exploitative and more sustainable than international tourism (Miller et al. 2010). However, domestic tourism has been neglected as a field of study (Iordanova and Stylidis 2019; Yuksel 2004), leading the domestic tourism experience to remain poorly understood from the perspective of national residents (Stone and Nyaupane 2019). It is therefore essential for scholars to examine this phenomenon to produce useful knowledge that can inform practice. Critically, gaining a robust theoretical understanding of the reasons for the key differences in the satisfaction of domestic and international tourists is imperative. Furthermore, identifying the determinants of a successful experience for these two classes of tourists is key to foster and guide the development of different approaches to the design and management of tourism attractions.

Second, there is widespread agreement in the literature that domestic and international tourists exhibit different motivations, preferences, attitudes, and satisfaction. However, most empirical studies comparing national and international visitors refrain from engaging in rigorous conceptual development and deriving testable research hypotheses (see Table 1). At best, existing studies provide brief ex-ante or ex-post theoretical arguments to explain the existence of the observed differences. This obfuscates the nature of the actual drivers of these differences and makes the interpretation of empirical results difficult. To fill this gap, this study conceptualizes and empirically tests the role of several theoretical constructs (i.e., hedonic value, escapism, and psychic distance) in explaining why international (vs. domestic) tourists report higher levels of satisfaction with the tourism experience.

Third, both nationality (i.e., where the tourist is from) and destination (i.e., where the tourist is going) are reported as possible factors influencing a tourist’s experience. While these two concepts are conceptually distinct, they are often entangled in the operational design of empirical studies, and thus easily confused. Consider, for instance, a study that identifies significant differences between a sample of domestic tourists (e.g., Chinese) and a sample of international tourists (e.g., from various Western countries) in their satisfaction levels with an attraction in China. It is impossible to clearly attribute the observed effects entirely to tourists’ nationality (and associated cultural background) or to how the destination is perceived by these two groups. On the one hand, it may be that Chinese and Western tourists enjoy different kinds of experiences due to cultural differences. On the other hand, it may be that foreign tourists have a better experience because they adopt a relaxed and open mindset, and enjoy exploring an unfamiliar destination. The inability to clearly distinguish between these two alternative explanations can result in confounding findings, impeding theoretical development in the discipline. Our research avoids this pitfall by comparing the experience of visitors originating from a particular country and cultural background who engage in tourism activities both in their home country and abroad (study 2). In so doing, we are able to assess the role of specific theoretical concepts (i.e., hedonic value, escapism, and psychic distance) in influencing the experience and satisfaction of domestic and international visitors, while controlling for the role of nationality. This research thus contributes to enhancing the conceptual clarity of the literature comparing international and domestic tourism.

Conceptual Background

Satisfaction of International vs. Domestic Visitors

Two main conclusions can be derived from the current literature addressing the differences between domestic and international tourists (Table 1). The first relates to the high degree of consistency in the research approach adopted and the results reported across the literature. From a research design perspective, existing studies compare the motivations, preferences, attitudes, and behaviors of domestic and international tourists in one particular destination. From a results perspective, virtually all articles show significant differences between domestic and international tourists on these dimensions. Of particular interest is the fact that all relevant studies systematically show that international tourists are more satisfied with the experience at a destination than their domestic counterparts. For instance, Yuksel (2004) reports that international visitors are more positive in their service evaluations of the shopping experience in a Turkish resort town. Iordanova and Stylidis (2019) find that international tourists have a better perception of Linz than domestic visitors. Lee, Lee, and Wicks (2004) observe that foreign visitors report a significantly higher level of satisfaction than domestic visitors at a major cultural event in South Korea. Simpson, Siguaw, and Sheng (2016) find that seasonal migrants are more satisfied with life at the destination than in their hometowns.

The second conclusion—resulting from a closer, more focused review—reveals that the extant literature is fragmented into two main streams, each offering a unique theoretical perspective on the phenomenon. A first set of studies develops the argument that tourists from different cultural backgrounds or nationalities are likely to have “multiple interpretations, aesthetic preferences, or judgments” (Bonn, Joseph, and Dai 2005). Cultural factors associated with the tourist’s country of origin are offered as a theoretical explanation for the differences identified in the experiences of domestic and international tourists, although such claims are rarely subjected to rigorous empirical verification. For instance, Bonn, Joseph, and Dai (2005) find that visitors have different image perceptions of a destination based on their geographic origin. They identify significant differences between Florida (in-state) residents, US domestic (non-Florida), and international visitors. Similarly, Ortega and Rodriguez (2007) examine the importance of information available at Spanish hotels from the perspective of domestic and international tourists. They find that international tourists evaluate information more favorably than domestic tourists. Both studies propose cultural factors as a plausible explanation for these differences, although it is unclear how the culture of a sample of tourists from diverse countries can be homogeneously defined, and why such culture would consistently lead to higher satisfaction levels than the domestic across all destinations studied.⁴

The second category of studies provides a more robust argument that the differences between the experience of domestic and international visitors at a particular destination might be explained by differences in the mindset adopted by these two classes of tourists. Carr (2002) posits that domestic visitors perceive the destination’s environment as relatively usual, ordinary, and similar to that of their place of residence. To illustrate, the same language is spoken, the same or similar attitudinal and behavioral norms apply when staying within the confines of one’s country (Li and Wu 2019). These resemblances may encourage the domestic tourist to adopt a residual mindset, describing the socio-cultural norms and values that influence behavior in a person’s place of origin (Ryan 1994). In contrast, international tourists leave a well-known environment to momentarily experience more uncertain and less predictable situations at the destination (Jafari 1987). Such visitors tend to abandon the mindset associated with the home environment and adopt a tourist mindset, describing a reluctance to impose one’s own worldview and judge events or people based on one’s usual normative system (Mkono 2016). Such mindset may cause the tourist to “become less critical, more tolerant of mistakes and may even find some failures amusing” (Yuksel 2004, p. 758), and ultimately to be more satisfied (or less dissatisfied) with their experience than domestic visitors. To illustrate, Yuksel (2004) compared domestic and international visitors’ evaluations of the shopping service experience in a resort town in southwest Turkey. Drawing on a sample of 139 Turkish and 590 international visitors, he identifies significant differences regarding service quality evaluations and behaviors (in terms of items purchased) between these two groups. In particular, he found that domestic visitors are more negative in their evaluations of the shopping experience. Since international visitors are likely to be less familiar with the environment of a foreign destination than their domestic counterparts, these visitors are likely to adopt a tourist mindset to a greater extent and assess the overall experience more positively. Therefore, we propose:

Hypothesis 1: Foreign visitors exhibit greater satisfaction with the tourism experience than domestic visitors.

The Role of Hedonic Value

The studies listed in Table 1 are extremely valuable in providing robust empirical evidence supporting the existence of major differences between domestic and international tourists. However, they fail to provide clear and unambiguous explanations regarding the differences identified. To explain why international tourists may report higher satisfaction levels than domestic tourists, we put forward the concept of hedonic value, which refers to the notion that consumers derive particular benefits from an experience that they perceive as fun, enjoyable, multisensorial, emotional, and exciting (Hirschman and Holbrook 1982). Providing this kind of experience to all tourists is a cornerstone of tourism destinations (Otto and Ritchie 1996). Carr (2002) examines the experience of tourists with similar backgrounds in different destinations. Specifically, he compares the behavior of British tourists holidaying in Mallorca (Spain) and Torquay (England). His work establishes that whether the tourist holidays in the home country or abroad is the key factor driving the adoption of specific patterns of behavior. He also refers to the aforementioned differences in mindset between domestic and foreign visitors to explain his results, namely the residual mindset of domestic tourists prevents them from behaving in the same manner as international tourists. In contrast, international tourists are more likely to adopt a tourist mindset, exhibiting behaviors and lifestyles representative of a temporary and out-of-the-ordinary set of norms and values in an unusual environment (Jafari 1987). Such behavioral patterns differ from those seen as normal and acceptable at home. Specifically, Carr (2002) shows that international tourists tend to go abroad to engage in activities such as going to nightclubs and bars, considered representative of a hedonic lifestyle. This kind of behavior is markedly different from that of domestic tourists who tend to favor active leisure activities such as visiting places of interest. This may be due to the fact that the domestic visitor evolves in a context that is not too dissimilar from the home environment. Based on this evidence, we propose that international visitors behaving in a more hedonic manner are likely to derive greater hedonic benefits from the tourism experience than domestic visitors. This leads to the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 2: Foreign (vs. domestic) visitors derive greater hedonic value from the tourism experience (hypothesis 2a), leading to an increase in satisfaction (hypothesis 2b). Hence, hedonic value mediates the effect of being a foreign (vs. domestic) visitor on satisfaction.

We designed a field study to test these hypotheses.

Study 1: A Field Study at a Wine and Spirit Tourism Attraction

This study first aims to replicate the notion that being a foreign (vs. domestic) tourist leads to higher satisfaction. Beyond this replication, study 1 also aims to show that this effect is due to foreigners perceiving higher hedonic value from an experience outside of their home country.

Procedure

This field study was conducted at Les Visites Hennessy in Cognac (France) with the management team’s agreement. Attracting approximatively 30,000 paying visitors yearly, Les Visites Hennessy is a popular tourist attraction in southwestern France. We selected this particular attraction because of the significant number of foreign visitors. In addition, it is positioned as an experiential attraction designed to provide “a multi-sensory discovery of the history, craft and secrets of Hennessy.”⁵ The 90-minute tour comprises a series of seven individual-themed sections that address a variety of Hennessy-related topics. These sections collectively provide a good balance of exciting (e.g., a boat trip, a tasting workshop) and mental activities (e.g., a short film on the history of the Hennessy family and brand, a presentation of the distillation and barrel-making processes). Hence, over two periods of six consecutive days each (one in July, the other in early September) in the peak summer season, four business students (who had been trained and remunerated to facilitate the administration of the questionnaire) supervised by a senior researcher intercepted visitors immediately after the visit. In total, 316 adult visitors (52.8% male, M_Age = 45.77, SD = 16.21) were interviewed, among them 153 (48.4%) foreigners. The international sample was well balanced, as no single nationality accounted for more than 13.5% of the total sample.

Visitors were asked to answer a series of questions on their profile, experience, and satisfaction. As the study included a wide range of questions, Hennessy’s management team explicitly requested keeping the questionnaire short; thus, the measures were (10-point Likert) mono-item scales. Following the procedure recommended by Bergkvist and Rossiter (2007), we selected items that exhibited the highest content validity. Satisfaction was measured using the same mono-item scale as the pilot study. This item was included up front to avoid any common-method variance bias (Podsakoff et al. 2003). Then, in accordance with the conceptualization of hedonic value as “more subjective and personal than utilitarian consumption and resulting more from fun and playfulness than from task completion” (Babin, Darden, and Griffin 1994, p. 646), the construct was measured by asking customers the extent to which they perceived the experience as fun. The country of origin of respondents was then captured to categorize respondents as domestic visitors (i.e., residing in France) or foreign visitors (i.e., residing abroad). Two versions of the questionnaire were created using a back-translation procedure to enable domestic visitors to answer the questionnaire in French and foreign visitors in English.

Results

To test the hypothesis (hypothesis 1) that foreign (vs. domestic) visitors exhibit greater satisfaction with their experience, a variance analysis was performed. The origin of the visitor (foreign, coded 1; domestic, coded 0) served as the factor variable, and satisfaction as the dependent variable. Since age (Danaher and Arweiler 1996) and gender (Wang, Qu, and Hsu 2016) can influence visitor satisfaction, the effects of these variables were controlled for by including their measures as covariates. Results revealed a positive main effect of being a foreign (vs. domestic) visitor (M_Foreign = 8.61, M_Domestic = 7.90, F(1, 315) = 12.41, p < .001), supporting hypothesis 1 (see Table 2). Further, a negative effect of age was observed (β = −0.014, t = 2.31, p < .05), indicating that older visitors are less satisfied with the experience. No effect of gender was found (p >.05).

Table 2.

Univariate Statistics (Study 1: 10-Point Scales).

	Foreign(n = 163)	Domestic(n = 153)	Total(N = 316)
Satisfaction	8.61 (1.45)	7.90 (1.92)	8.24 (1.74)
Hedonic value	8.92 (1.28)	7.73 (2.25)	8.32 (1.93)

Note: Standard deviations are in parentheses.

The second analysis was performed to test hypothesis 2 and the indirect effect of being a foreign (vs. domestic) visitor on satisfaction through hedonic value. This mediation analysis was performed using Process macro and 5,000 bootstrap samples. Specifically, the visitors’ origin (foreign vs. domestic) served as the independent variable, hedonic value as the mediating variable, and satisfaction as the dependent variable. Again, age and gender served as a covariate. Results revealed a significant indirect effect of being a foreign (vs. domestic) visitor on satisfaction through hedonic value (β = .41, SE = 0.10, 95% CI = 0.243, 0.639). More specifically, being a foreign (vs. domestic) visitor leads to an increase in hedonic value (β = 1.08, t = 5.18, p < .001), which then increases satisfaction (β = 0.38, t = 7.70, p < .001; Figure 1). Of note, age had a marginally significant negative effect on hedonic value (β = −0.012, t = −1.92, p = .057). Additionally, when including the mediating variable of hedonic value, the direct effect of being a foreign (vs. domestic) visitor on satisfaction is not significant (p > .10), suggesting that hedonic value fully mediates this effect. Overall, these results support hypotheses 1 and 2, and the notion that being a foreign (vs. domestic) visitor indirectly leads to satisfaction with the experience through the mediating role of hedonic value.

Figure 1.

The indirect effect of being a foreign (vs. domestic) visitor on satisfaction through the mediating role of hedonic value (N = 316). n.s. = not significant.

Discussion

Study 1 replicates the results obtained in previous research (e.g., Bonn, Joseph, and Dai 2005; Simpson, Siguaw, and Sheng 2016; Stone and Nyaupane 2019; Yuksel 2004) showing that foreign visitors exhibit more positive responses to their visit than domestic visitors. Specifically, we show that foreign visitors—compared to domestic visitors—are more likely to be satisfied with a wine and spirit tourism experience. Interestingly, this study also identifies hedonic value as the underlying mechanism explaining this effect, indicating that it is because foreign visitors derive more hedonic value from their experience that they are more satisfied. This result extends previous research showing that compared to domestic tourists, visitors on vacation in a foreign country tend to behave in a more hedonistic manner (Carr 2002). According to our results, not only do international visitors behave more hedonistically than domestic visitors, they also derive greater hedonic benefits from the tourism experience.

However, what remains unknown is a clear explanation of why foreign visitors derive greater hedonic value from—and exhibit higher satisfaction with—their experience. In this regard, we argue that the reason for such greater hedonic value and satisfaction for foreign visitors may be escapism. The classic definition of Pine and Gilmore (1999) considers escapism as an experience that is so intense and involving that it makes consumers temporarily escape their daily life. A wide body of research supports the idea that an important motivation for people to engage in either mundane experiences, such as shopping (Babin, Darden, and Griffin 1994), or in more extraordinary experiences, such as river rafting (Arnould and Price 1993) or surfing (Canniford and Shankar 2013), lies in the concept of escapism. Prior research supports the importance of escapism in describing and understanding the tourism experience (Hosany and Gilbert 2010; Sheng and Chen 2012; Pearce and Lee 2005; Rojek 1993). Tourism is often seen as form of temporary escape, a way to do something different and momentarily forget one’s ordinary life (Barr et al. 2010).

In this regard, building on Oh, Fiore, and Jeoung (2007), Cova, Carù, and Cayla (2018) recently proposed distinguishing between the concepts of “escaping from” and “escaping to.” The underlying idea is that consumers may escape “from” social settings and structures when the primary motive is to get away, and escape “to” something new or different where the purpose is immersion in an alternative experiential context. These two concepts of escapism and immersion are core to the tourism experience (Carù and Cova 2003) and interrelated. As Frochot, Elliot, and Kreziak (2017) note in a study of tourists in a mountain resort, immersion closely ties in “with the feeling of getting away: the more immersed they got, the more they forgot about everyday life” (p. 87), indicating that the feeling of escapism derives from being immersed in the experience. Put differently, when people immerse “in” the experience, they escape “from” their reality.

Moreover, the distinction between “escaping from” and “escaping to” resonates with the well-established push–pull framework (Dann 1977), which has long been used in tourism research to explain the motivations underlying tourist behavior (Klenosky 2002). Push factors refer to a person’s motivational influences that lead to the decision to travel and get away from daily life, while pull factors refer to the forces driving a person to decide where to go. From this theoretical perspective, push factors can be linked to the notion of “escaping from,” while pull factors can be linked to the concept of “escaping to.” We believe that this distinction may be helpful in understanding the greater levels of hedonic value and satisfaction observed among foreign visitors. More precisely, foreign visitors may feel a greater degree of escapism than domestic visitors because by travelling to, staying in, and visiting a place away from home, they not only escape “to” a particular foreign destination but they also escape “from” their home country. In contrast, domestic visitors only escape “to” without escaping “from.” Building on this distinction, we suggest that foreign visitors may experience a greater feeling of escapism than domestic visitors.

The concepts of escapism and hedonic value are fundamental parts of the experiential consumption paradigm (Hirschman and Holbrook 1982). Marketing and tourism scholars have argued that they are closely linked, for instance, in the hotel industry (Atwal and Williams 2009), or in the context of salsa training (Holmqvist, Ruiz, and Peñaloza 2020), but the relationship between these concepts is not fully clear. In contrast, in the media literature, consensus exists around the notion that entertainment consumption is mainly driven by escapist motivations (Bartsch and Schneider 2014). This evidence suggests that escapism may exert a positive influence on hedonic value. In a tourism context, it stands to reason that visitors who feel that the experience allows them to escape from their daily routine are more likely to regard it as fun or exciting. Therefore, we propose that the greater degree of escapism felt by foreign visitors leads them to derive greater hedonic value from the tourism experience. Hence:

Hypothesis 3: Foreign visitors have a greater feeling of escapism in the tourism experience than domestic visitors (hypothesis 3a), and such escapism leads to greater hedonic value (hypothesis 3b).

Because of the predicted mediating effect of hedonic value on the visitor origin (foreign vs. domestic)–satisfaction relationship, and the effect of escapism on hedonic value, escapism and hedonic value would seem to be the underlying mechanisms that serially explain the indirect effect of visitor origin (foreign vs. domestic) on satisfaction. Therefore, we predict:

Hypothesis 4: Escapism and hedonic value serially mediate the indirect effect of being a foreign (vs. domestic) visitor on satisfaction.

Focusing on foreign visitors, we also suggest that what may be important to account for their greater feeling of escapism when living a tourism experience abroad lies in the notion of distance. Since traveling implies moving from one place to another, some notion of distance is implicitly involved, and foreign visitors thus experience being distant from their home country and some escape from their daily routine and environment. However, beyond this basic geographic view of distance (i.e., in kilometers or miles), one could argue that some countries may be geographically distant but rather close at the cultural level, which may prevent foreign tourists from experiencing deep feelings of escapism. Hence, to explain the degree of escapism felt by foreign visitors, we here rely on the notion of psychic distance, a concept close to that of cultural distance developed by Hofstede (1991). The difference between these two types of distance lies in their unit of analysis: while cultural distance measures differences and similarities in national cultures (the level of assessment thus being national), psychic distance assesses cultural differences and similarities between countries at the individual level (Sousa and Bradley 2006). Put differently, psychic distance reflects an individual’s perception of cultural differences among countries, while cultural distance uses overall cultural values to analyze differences between countries. As escapism exists at the individual level, the concept of psychic distance appears more appealing to understand how distance can influence escapism, and subsequently hedonic value and satisfaction.

The extant tourism literature on distance sees the culture of the intended destination country as an important reason for traveling to this destination (McKercher and Cros 2003; Ng, Lee, and Soutar 2007), suggesting that cultural distance may play a critical role in the tourism destination choice. However, past research on the effects of the individual perception of cultural distance (i.e., psychic distance) is inconclusive. On the one hand, some research provides support for the idea that cultural similarity is preferred over cultural difference when choosing a destination or evaluating its attractiveness. For instance, consistent with the similarity-attraction hypothesis (Byrne and Nelson 1965), which posits that people are attracted to others with similar attitudes and beliefs, Basala and Klenosky (2001) found that tourists are more likely to visit a novel destination provided their home language is spoken at this destination. Del Bosque and San Martín (2008) report that shorter psychic distance leads to more favorable cognitive and affective evaluations of the destination image due to requiring lower adaptation efforts. These results suggest that the shorter the psychic distance between a destination and a tourist’s home country, the more likely it is that a tourist chooses and forms positive evaluations of that destination.

On the other hand, one could argue that greater psychic distance is actually beneficial for tourists, in that it may prompt them to have deeper feelings of escapism. For instance, Lepp and Gibson (2003) highlighted that people are aware of the differences in languages, signs, and customs that traveling to a culturally distant country imply. The fact that visitors who decide to travel to culturally distant destinations are aware of such differences suggests that they may actually seek to experience a degree of cultural diversity or novelty. This perspective thus assumes an underlying motivation for international tourists to escape from their local or home culture. Moreover, in a study on Hong Kong visitors, Ahn and McKercher (2015) found that tourist attractions that are unique to Hong Kong, such as the Stanley Market, the outer Lamma Island, the Symphony of Lights laser show, and the Star Ferry trip across the harbor, were more popular among tourists from culturally distant countries. This evidence suggests that those culturally distant tourists strive to escape from their everyday life to experience something new and different from a cultural perspective. We thus posit:

Hypothesis 5: For foreign visitors, psychic distance positively influences escapism.

Given the predicted effect of escapism on hedonic value, which is in turn hypothesized as increasing satisfaction, we propose the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 6: For foreign visitors, escapism and hedonic value serially mediate the indirect effect of psychic distance on satisfaction.

This set of hypotheses leads to the following theoretical model (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

The serially mediated theoretical model of the effect of being a foreign (vs. domestic) visitor on satisfaction.

Study 2: Experimental Study at a Natural History Museum

Similarly to study 1, study 2 aims to test the predicted greater level of satisfaction among foreign (vs. domestic) visitors, and the mediating role of hedonic value in this phenomenon. Further, study 2 aims to demonstrate that escapism is the underlying mechanism that explains why foreign (vs. domestic) visitors derive greater hedonic value from their tourism experience. As prior research remains inconclusive as to whether distance has a positive or negative impact on the experience of foreign visitors, study 2 also examines how distance can prompt escapism, which in turn is hypothesized as driving hedonic value and satisfaction.

Method and Measures

To achieve these goals, study 2 sets out to demonstrate that people of the same nationality and country of residence who experience the same tourism setting can exhibit different levels of satisfaction, simply because they consider themselves a domestic or foreign visitor. Specifically, an online panelist (Prolific) asked 586 English individuals living in England to participate in this study, and through the scenario presented imagine themselves spending a few days in a holiday destination with some close friends. To manipulate visitor origin, the choice was made to have participants spend this holiday either in Plymouth in southwestern England (i.e., participants were assigned to a domestic condition) or in Winnipeg in Canada (i.e., participants were assigned to a foreign condition). By manipulating the domestic versus foreign origin of tourists from one given country (here, England), we seek to demonstrate that the differences in experience and satisfaction are due to the visitors’ (i.e., domestic or foreign) origin and associated mindset rather than to potential differences in cultural background across samples of foreign tourists from different countries (see Table 1).

As for the sample used, the choice of English participants was made in light of the large proportion of Britons (86%) holidaying either at home or abroad (ABTA 2018). A short city break was deemed appropriate for this study, as this kind of holiday is the most popular among Britons, with 48% taking one domestically or abroad in 2018 (ABTA 2018).

Moreover, Canada was selected as the foreign destination because the foreign country had to be sufficiently far from England for participants assigned to the foreign condition to perceive a degree of psychological distance from their home country. Further, Canada is a top tourism destination⁶ and North America is highly popular with British tourists (ABTA 2018).

Regarding the stimuli, the scenario indicated that due to bad weather on a particular day of the stay, no outdoor activity could be considered, leading participants to decide to visit a newly opened natural history museum situated nearby. To control for potential confounding and familiarity biases, the museum was depicted as new and recently open. The museum was briefly described, and participants were instructed to watch a 35-second video (consisting of seven pictures shown for five seconds each) of the museum. To avoid any confounder here, the pictures were those of an actual museum in Bordeaux, France, which recently reopened after renovation. In choosing these pictures, we were highly confident that participants would not recognize the museum. Importantly, to control for the potential variance in hedonic value across the foreign and domestic conditions, the museum was the same in both. In so doing, we ensured that hedonic value was not confounded with the foreign versus domestic manipulation. An important point to note is that we expect to find a significant difference in satisfaction across the two conditions of visitor origin (foreign vs. domestic). Using the same museum was therefore considered the most appropriate methodological choice to provide strong empirical evidence that it is not the attraction per se that contributes to differences in the satisfaction level of visitors, but their international versus domestic origin and associated mindset.

Then, participants answered a series of questions. Importantly, to address the limitations associated with the use of single-item measures imposed by the management team in study 1, the measures were full multi-item scales employed and supported in prior research. Specifically, participants first rated their satisfaction using a four-item measure adapted from Oliver (1980; α = 0.89). Sample items were “It would be exactly what I expected” or “I would be satisfied with my decision to visit the museum.” Then, participants completed a five-item scale of hedonic value adapted from Voss, Spangenberg, and Grohmann (2003; α = 0.94). For this measure, following Babin and Darden (1995), the semantic differential format was eliminated and the items were proposed using Likert-type statements (e.g., “To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding your experience visiting the museum?”: It would be [i] fun, [ii] thrilling, [iii], exciting, [iv] delightful, and [v] enjoyable). A six-item measure of escapism taken from Oh, Fiore, and Jeoung (2007) was then proposed (α = 0.91; e.g., “I would feel like I was living in a different time or place” or “I would totally forget about my daily routine”). Next, a seven-item measure of psychic distance adapted from previous studies (Jain 1989; Sousa and Bradley 2005) was used to capture the perception of differences between the participants’ home country (England) and the foreign country (Canada). Participants allocated to the foreign visitors condition were asked to indicate the degree to which the foreign country was similar or different to their home country on the dimensions of climatic conditions, purchasing power, lifestyles, preferences, language, level of literacy, and cultural values (α = 0.83).

The measures exhibited satisfying convergent validity, as the variance extracted from among the set of construct items was higher than 0.5 (Hair et al. 2005). The discriminant validity among these measures was then tested using the procedure proposed by Fornell and Larcker (1981). In spite of some significant correlations among the constructs, the average variance extracted for each was higher than the squared correlation between these constructs and any other construct, supporting the discriminant validity of the measures (Table 3).

Table 3.

Squared Correlations, Mean, and Standard Deviations (Studies 1 and 2).

	1	2	3	4
Study 1: (Actual) wine and spirit experience
Satisfaction	–	0.454	–	–
Hedonic value	0.206	–	–	–
Study 2: (Fictitious) natural history museum
Satisfaction	0.763	0.763	0.424	0.033
Hedonic value	0.582	0.821	0.554	0.055
Escapism	0.179	0.306	0.684	0.205
Psychic distance	0.001	0.003	0.051	0.538

p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.

The squared correlations among constructs appear below the diagonal; the correlations appear above the diagonal. For the multi-item measures used in study 2, the average variance extracted (AVE) for each construct is on the diagonal. Constructs are measured on a 10-point Likert-type scale in study 1, and 7-point in study 2.

Further, for manipulation check purposes, an open-ended question asked participants to indicate the name of the country where the museum was located in the scenario they read. Participants (n = 8) who did not provide the correct answer were removed from the data set. A quality check was also included in the questionnaire in the form of an attention item stating “If you read this please check ‘strongly disagree.’” Responses that did not meet this specification (n = 31) were removed from the data set, leading to a final sample of observations from 535 individuals (55.5% female, M_Age = 36.22, SD = 11.76, from 18 to 65 years old). Finally, a question assessing the perceived realism of the scenario asked, “Would you say that the scenario describing a visit to this natural history museum was 1 ‘Not truthful at all’ to 7 ‘Very truthful.’” Participants considered the scenarios realistic (M = 5.40, SD = 1.28). The scenarios, photos, and questionnaire employed in this study are reproduced in the Web Appendix.

Results

The first analysis aimed to replicate the notion that foreign (vs. domestic) visitors exhibit greater satisfaction with their experience. Bringing further support to hypothesis 1, the results from a similar analysis of variance as in study 1 revealed a positive main effect of being a foreign (vs. domestic) visitor (M_Foreign = 5.51, M_Domestic = 5.31), F(1, 534) = 4.93, p < .05 (Table 4).

Table 4.

Univariate Statistics (Studies 1 and 2).

	Study 1(10-Point Scales)			Study 2(7-Point Scales)
	Foreign(n = 163)	Domestic(n = 153)	Total(N = 316)	Foreign(n = 283)	Domestic(n = 252)	Total(N = 535)
Satisfaction	8.61 (1.45)	7.90 (1.92)	8.24 (1.74)	5.51 (1.04)	5.31 (1.14)	5.41 (1.09)
Hedonic value	8.92 (1.28)	7.73 (2.25)	8.32 (1.93)	4.96 (1.19)	4.75 (1.22)	4.86 (1.21)
Escapism	–	–	–	3.69 (1.26)	3.46 (1.30)	3.58 (1.28)
Psychic distance	–	–	–	3.31 (1.06)	–	–

Note: Standard deviations in brackets.

Age and gender had no effect (p’s > .05). The next analysis pertained to hypothesis 2 and the mediating role of hedonic value in the effect of visitor origin on satisfaction. Using the same procedure as in study 1 (Process, model 4, 5,000 bootstraps), results from the mediation analysis revealed a significant indirect effect of being a foreign (vs. domestic) visitor on satisfaction through the mediating role of hedonic value (β = 0.14, SE = 0.07, 95% CI = 0.005, 0.291). As in study 1, and supporting hypothesis 2, results indicate that being a foreign (vs. domestic) visitor increases hedonic value (β = 0.21, t = 2.01, p < .05), such value eventually increasing satisfaction (β = 0.68, t = 27.14, p < .001). Of note, age had a marginally significant and negative effect on hedonic value (β = −0.008, t = −1.87, p = .061), indicating that older visitors derive less hedonic value than younger visitors.

Turning to the main objectives of study 2 focused on the effects of escapism and distance, a serial mediation analysis (Process, model 4, 5,000 bootstraps) was performed. Precisely, the origin of the visitor (foreign vs. domestic) served as the independent variable, escapism and hedonic value as the mediating variables, and satisfaction as the dependent variable. As previously, age and gender served as covariates. Results revealed significant serial mediation (β = 0.08, SE = 0.04, 95% CI = 0.001, 0.163), indicating that foreign (vs. domestic) visitors experience more satisfaction because they report greater feelings of escapism and derive greater levels of hedonic value. This notion is supported by the results showing that the foreign versus domestic origin of the visitor increases escapism (β = 0.23, t = 2.06, p < .05), which in turn increases hedonic value (β = 0.52, t = 15.19, p < .001), as posited in hypothesis 3. Then, and bringing support to hypothesis 4, such hedonic value is shown to exert a positive effect on satisfaction (β = 0.69, t = 22.65, p < .001; Figure 3).

Figure 3.

The serially mediated effect of being a foreign versus domestic visitor on satisfaction (N = 535). ns = not significant.

The last analysis pertained specifically to foreign visitors, that is, those who read the scenario about visiting the museum in Canada. To test the notion that for such visitors it is psychic distance that prompts escapism, hedonic value, and satisfaction, the same serial mediation analysis as previously was performed, but among this set of visitors only and with distance included as the independent variable. Supporting hypothesis 6, significant serial mediation was observed (β = 0.082, SE = 0.03, 95% CI = 0.027, 0.146), indicating that for foreign visitors, psychic distance increases escapism (β = 0.22, t = 3.12, p < .01), which in turn increases hedonic value (β = 0.55, t = 11.43, p < .001). Such hedonic value then positively affects satisfaction (β = 0.66, t = 17.16, p < .001) (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

The serially mediated effect of psychic distance on satisfaction for foreign visitors (n = 283). n.s. = not significant.

Discussion

Study 2 goes beyond the mere replication of the “international visitors report greater levels of satisfaction than domestic visitors” phenomenon observed in the literature and in study 1, identifying the serial mechanisms that explain this phenomenon. Specifically, study 2 provides evidence for the notion that it is because international visitors feel a deeper sense of escapism that they subsequently derive greater hedonic value, and eventually higher satisfaction with the tourism experience. Further, escapism is also shown to be affected by psychic distance. This indicates that because international visitors perceive a degree of distance between the home country and the destination, they experience a greater sense of escapism, derive greater hedonic value from the experience, and report greater levels of satisfaction.

General Conclusion

Implications for Theory

The main contribution of this study is to provide a clear and robust explanation for why international visitors are more satisfied with the tourism experience than domestic visitors. The domestic versus international visitor phenomenon has been examined in a range of studies, as reported in Table 1. While significant differences in the satisfaction levels of these two groups have been consistently identified, there is a lack of clarity regarding the drivers of such differences. On the one hand, existing studies fail to formulate theory-driven hypotheses that would enable a clear conceptualization and the subsequent empirical verification of the phenomenon. On the other hand, the research design of previous studies makes it virtually impossible to disentangle the effects of different possible factors (e.g., nationality, tourist mindset) on visitor satisfaction. This is due to the fact that with the exception of Carr (2002), existing studies compare the experience of a domestic sample and an international sample in a particular destination. As a result, our understanding of the phenomenon remains limited, and more studies need to be conducted to uncover the mechanisms underlying the significant differences reported in the satisfaction levels of domestic and international visitors. The present research is an attempt to address these issues and enhance conceptual neatness in the tourism literature. Robust results were derived from two empirical studies relying on different research designs (i.e., field study and experimental study), conducted in different settings (i.e., wine and spirit tour, museum), using different samples (actual visitors and participants in an online experiment). Crucially, study 2 relies on an international and domestic sample residing in the same country (England) to minimize the risk that different national backgrounds influence the results. Taken together, these two studies thus allow a deep and rigorous investigation of the international versus domestic visitor satisfaction phenomenon, thus strengthening the generalizability of the results (Winer 1999).

This work provides useful and relevant implications for tourism research. First, we establish that the concept of hedonic value plays a key role in understanding the differences in satisfaction levels between domestic and foreign visitors. Our results clearly show that international visitors are more satisfied than domestic visitors because they derive greater hedonic benefits from the tourism experience. While previous studies have shown a direct link between hedonic value and visitor satisfaction in a tourism context (Hosany and Gilbert 2010), this research provides evidence supporting the existence of significant differences in how domestic and international visitors perceive the hedonic aspects of an experience. This finding is a direct extension to the work of Carr (2002) showing that international tourists exhibit hedonic behaviors to a greater degree than domestic visitors. While Carr (2002) captured the actual activities (e.g., going to bars and nightclubs) that visitors engage in to arrive at his conclusion, our theory-led empirical study conducted in two different tourism contexts clearly demonstrates the relationship between hedonic value and visitor satisfaction, highlighting key differences between domestic and international visitors.

Furthermore, our work underlines that the reason international visitors derive greater hedonic value from the tourism experience lies in the notion of escapism. International visitors are able to escape from their usual daily life and into a new environment to a greater extent than domestic visitors. This provides a novel and useful perspective to understand and explain the international versus domestic visitor phenomenon. Generally, from a consumer behavior perspective, escapism is assumed to allow consumers to become truly engaged in a superior and memorable experience (Pine and Gilmore 1999; Scott, Cayla, and Cova 2017). This understanding of escapism has been applied to the tourism experience, where scholars have posited that an outstanding tourism attraction or destination should be designed to enable visitors to become so involved in the experience that it becomes a form of temporary escape. However, existing empirical studies conducted in the context of bed-and-breakfasts (Oh, Fiore, and Jeoung 2007) and sea cruises (Hosany and Witham 2010) have failed to establish a direct relationship between escapism and key attitudinal and behavioral outcomes, such as visitor satisfaction, memory, and revisiting intention. These authors questioned the relevance and usefulness of the existing escapism measurement scale (Hosany and Witham 2010) as well as its applicability in particular contexts (Oh, Fiore, and Jeoung 2007) to explain these results. Our research shows the important role of escapism in driving the perceived quality of the tourism experience. Importantly, our results demonstrate that the relationship between escapism and satisfaction is not direct. Rather, it is mediated by the concept of hedonic value, which can be seen as the underlying mechanism explaining why international visitors, who report greater feelings of escapism, are more satisfied with the overall experience. This finding may help to reconcile the previous inconclusive findings noted above.

Finally, the concepts of cultural and psychic distance have been applied to understand tourism destination choices (McKercher and Cros 2003; Ng, Lee, and Soutar 2007), the behavior of international tourists (Crotts 2004), destination image formation (Del Bosque and San Martín 2008), and tourists’ construal and conceptualization of the experience (Massara and Severino 2013). In contrast, our research examines the relevance of psychic distance for the experience and evaluation of international tourists. This issue has received scant attention in the current body of knowledge. Importantly, we capture the perceptions of individual tourists to measure distance, as we deem psychic distance a more adequate concept to understand how differences and similarities between countries can affect the tourism experience. Our results demonstrate that the visitor’s subjective evaluation of differences between the home country and the destination country on some core dimensions influences overall satisfaction. This impact is explained through the mediating effect of escapism and hedonic value. Our findings build on and extend the work of Ahn and McKercher (2015) who demonstrate a relationship between psychic distance and attraction popularity. Our contribution is in applying the psychic distance concept to understand and explain how differences in feelings of escapism are formed for international visitors, emphasizing the importance of this concept in understanding the international tourism experience.

Implications for Practice

The first important implication for tourism practitioners is to increase their awareness of key differences in how tourists experience and evaluate an attraction. For any given tourism offering, international visitors may well have a better experience and exhibit greater satisfaction levels than domestic visitors. It is important to understand that neither the design and delivery of the offering nor the characteristics of the domestic population may be directly responsible for these differences. Rather, such differences may be intrinsically linked to the visitor’s origin and, consequently, the ability to cut off from the daily routine and reality.

Another connected implication is to suggest that all tourist attractions must invest time and resources in ensuring the experience is accessible to all foreign visitors by proposing it in the relevant languages through appropriate technology (e.g., audio or multimedia devices) or relying on trained multilingual staff. Not only do international visitors represent a significant source of revenue, they are also likely to derive greater benefits from the experience than domestic visitors. Since visitor satisfaction generally drives advocacy and positive word-of-mouth behaviors, international visitors provide an important opportunity to increase the attractiveness and visibility of the attraction.

More importantly, our research brings to the foreground the question of what can be done to address this imbalance between domestic and foreign visitors. The underlying reason why domestic visitors have less fun and are less satisfied ultimately lies in their greater inability to “get away from it all.” In other words, increasing the degree of escapism felt by domestic visitors is a prerequisite to increasing hedonic value and overall satisfaction.

One potentially fruitful approach to enable domestic tourists to view the experience as distinct and as a form of escape from their everyday living environment is to position and anchor the attraction in the destination’s local culture and customs. Tourism practitioners are encouraged to identify, select, and integrate local specificities and particularities into existing experiences. In many instances, there are plentiful opportunities to enhance existing tourism offerings by leveraging features that are unique, emblematic, or representative of the area where the attraction is located, for instance, placing emphasis on local produce, products, architecture, cuisine, language or dialect, traditions, odors, colors, customs, and so forth. Sensory design and marketing (e.g., Krishna 2012) provide powerful tools and techniques to help practitioners emphasize local or regional particularities through invoking visitors’ multiple senses.

Similarly, a good way to disconnect from the home environment is to participate in the local context by eating local food, tasting local drinks, meeting local people, interacting with the local environment and communities, and experiencing the place “like a local.” Another alternative is therefore for practitioners to portray the attraction as popular with local people (i.e., residing in close proximity to the destination) and/or depict the attraction as locally produced for and consumed by locals. For instance, pintxos bars in Bilbao’s old town are very successful in attracting a mix of local, domestic, and international tourists keen to sample locally made tapas and Txakoli wine. It is, at least partly, because local residents make up an important proportion of the customer base that these bars are popular with the broader audience of Spanish and international tourists. Infusing strong local indicators into the experience contributes to increasing the likelihood that the attraction is readily associated with local cultural meanings, reflecting local culture, norms, and identities. It would ensure that domestic tourists from different regions engage with the local society and culture, and feel they have escaped from their usual life and environment. Although the idea of imbuing attractions and destinations with associations of local heritage, values, and culture is not new, our research emphasizes that enhancing existing experiences in this way can be particularly valuable for domestic tourists.

Limitations and Future Research

This research has several limitations that future research could address in order to gain further insights into the phenomenon. A first limitation lies in the use of single items to measure hedonic value (study 1) and visitor satisfaction (Pilot study and study 1). These studies were performed at two major tourist attractions. In both instances, the management team was reluctant to use multiple-item measures to keep the questionnaire as succinct as possible and minimize visitor inconvenience. Two steps were taken to reduce the potential impact on measurement quality. Following the procedure recommended by Bergkvist and Rossiter (2007), we selected items that exhibited the highest content validity. We also performed an additional study (study 2) that used established multi-item scales to measure all the theoretical constructs. More generally, the issue of using single versus multiple items in field research is not negligible. We point fellow scholars grappling with this issue toward useful methodological resources (Drolet and Morrison 2001; Heggestad et al. 2019).

Second, study 2 used one particular scenario only (i.e., a visit to a recently renovated natural history museum on a rainy day during a hypothetical domestic or international visit). In line with Morales, Amir, and Lee (2017) noting that scenario-based research often produces “responses that typically reflect consumers’ thoughts and theories about the scenarios, and not their actual behavior” (p. 465), our results and conclusions may have been directly influenced by the scenario and context selected. Future research would gain from examining if the results replicate when using another tourism setting that is highly representative of a real-life situation, for instance, a multiday tourism context, such as a resort or theme park, located either in a domestic or foreign country. Respondents could be asked to imagine themselves spending a few days in the selected setting to determine whether our results replicate. If so, this would bring further empirical evidence in support of the notion that international visitors exhibit greater satisfaction than domestic visitors.

In addition to the opportunities arising from these shortcomings, other interesting research avenues ensue. Previous studies have demonstrated the existence of differences between domestic and international visitors across a range of dimensions. A natural next step would be to determine if distance and escapism exert significant influence on destination image formation, travel motivation, and expenditure, for instance. Further, the concept of customer (visitor) value has multiple dimensions (see Leroi-Werelds [2019] for a recent literature review). It would be interesting to examine the relationships between visitor origin and a range of value dimensions. For example, Ponsignon, Durrieu, and Bouzdine-Chameeva (2017) argue that tourist attractions must strike a balance between the evocation of emotional responses and cognitive reactions to support the creation of memorable experiences. Since international tourists tend to be less familiar with the destination than domestic tourists, they may derive greater educational benefits from their experiences.

Another interesting research avenue lies in exploring the relationship between the concepts of immersion and distance. Distance has a range of facets including physical distance (Carù and Cova 2006), cultural distance (Ahn and McKercher 2015), role distance (Lindberg and Østergaard 2015), and emotional distance (St-James, Darveau, and Fortin 2018). Previous research appears to support the existence of an inverse relationship between the various dimensions of distance and immersion. For instance, Lunardo and Ponsignon (2019) argue that the spatial distance between a tourist and the object being experienced must be reduced to facilitate immersion. Similarly, St-James, Darveau, and Fortin (2018) explore how tourists achieve a state of immersion when watching audiovisual content. Their qualitative work shows that consumers engage in operations of appropriation to reduce the physical, mental, and emotional distance with the content being watched. Despite previous conceptual arguments and qualitative evidence, the relationship between the various facets of distance and immersion has not been subjected to rigorous empirical scrutiny.

A final avenue for future research is to disentangle the effects of nationality and culture on the attitude and behavior of domestic and international tourists. Culture represents a broader and more complex concept than nationality, as it includes a range of notions such as values, beliefs, mental processes, and behaviors (House et al. 2004). Future research could benefit from assessing culture in a way that enables researchers to appraise potential within-country cultural differences. This would involve measuring cultural orientation or cultural values and practices at the individual level. In so doing, research could provide robust evidence of the role that nationality and culture play in influencing visitor satisfaction.

Supplemental Material

Web_Appendix_online_supp – Supplemental material for Why Are International Visitors More Satisfied with the Tourism Experience? The Role of Hedonic Value, Escapism, and Psychic Distance

Supplemental material, Web_Appendix_online_supp for Why Are International Visitors More Satisfied with the Tourism Experience? The Role of Hedonic Value, Escapism, and Psychic Distance by Frédéric Ponsignon, Renaud Lunardo and Mohamed Michrafy in Journal of Travel Research

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the management teams of La Cité du Vin and Les Visites Hennessy for their assistance in the data collection process.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Frédéric Ponsignon

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author Biographies

Frédéric Ponsignon is an Associate Professor of Operations Management at KEDGE Business School. His research primarily focuses on the design of service delivery systems, customer experience management, quality management, and service recovery management.

Renaud Lunardo is an Associate Professor of Marketing at KEDGE Business School. His primary research interests focus on the effects of marketing in-store stimuli (e.g., atmospherics like ambient scents, music, colors . . .) on store perceptions and inferences of manipulative intent.

Mohamed Michrafy has been a Professor at KEDGE Business School and a consultant in both marketing and operations management since 1990. He holds a PhD and a Master’s degree in management sciences and in economics.

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