Journal of Travel Research

Prior research regarding residents and tourists has focused on their commonalities and interactions occurring on-site. What is missing from the literature is an examination of residents as information sources to potential tourists. Online travel communities offer such a viable venue. This study has two main purposes. The first is to examine the influence residents may have on travel decisions and identify the types of travel decisions they influence. The second is to compare the influence residents have on travel decisions with other online community members (i.e., experienced travelers). Treemapper is used to identify the country forums, and thematic networks are used for the analysis of influence of eWOM. The results reveal that nearly one-third of the communication threads (including 1,699 postings from 713 contributing members) have been influential for members. Residents are more influential in accommodations and food and beverage recommendations, whereas experienced travelers are more influential in the destination information category.

The aim of this article is to use dynamic panel data cointegration technique to determine elasticities of tourist arrivals to Australia, using income, real exchange rates, and airfares as demand determinants. Annual data from 1991 to 2007 for arrivals from the 10 main markets are used. Previous studies that applied dynamic panel data sets in the tourism context have used the Arellano—Bond estimation technique. Because this technique produces biased and inconsistent estimates in samples with a small time span, this article uses the corrected least square dummy variable technique to generate unbiased and efficient parameter estimates. The results obtained show that demand is inelastic with respect to its determinants in the short run and elastic in the long run. The main implications of these results are that maintaining destination price competitiveness and consumer satisfaction should be rated very high in the priorities of the Australian tourism industry.

This study examines attitudes and opinions of local residents regarding place marketing and identifies the role of cognitive, affective, and behavioral components in residents’ positive or negative attitudes toward place marketing. The conceptual model is developed based on attitude, reasoned action, and social exchange theories. Data are collected across several destination areas at different levels of tourism development to test Doxey’s Irridex model. Results show an adequate role of the cognitive, affective, and behavioral components on positive or negative attitude formation in place marketing. Personal benefit from tourism is relevant for moderating the relationship between the three components and attitudes toward place marketing. Results imply residents from the least developed tourism county are more optimistic about increasing the local tourism economic growth as they are in the beginning stage of tourism development compared with the moderately and most developed counties, where some residents openly express a strong dislike of tourists.

An activity that has been found to enhance wine tourism opportunities is wine and food festivals.This article examines how, through the manipulation of such festival attributes, festival managers can foster positive consumer perceptions of products central to the festival. The article first describes the attributes that define a festival and then, using the Moonlight Wine Tour festival as a case for study, explores how much of an influence certain festival attributes have on shaping visitors’ perceptions of the wine on show. An ANOVA determines that five festival attributes are effective predictors of creating positive changes in people’s perceptions, while one attribute has a negative effect. A binomial generalized linear model is then created for use in managerial situations by specifying which combined set of attributes are the most significant in creating positive and negative changes in consumer perceptions.

This study investigates the influence of familiarity, structural constraints, and level of involvement in the decision on whether to search for information and on the strength of the search effort made by individuals who decide to search. Data have been collected from 1,677 structured personal interviews undertaken in two Portuguese national parks. Results indicate that financial constraints encourage people to engage in search but time and accessibility constraints do not exert any influence on search. Evidence indicates a tentative relationship between level of involvement and search effort and suggests this relationship is strongest in the early stages of the decision process. Finally, those who are less familiar with destinations are more likely to search for information about those destinations.

Both France and Canada rank as highly developed tourist destinations. This study compares the underexplored area of the needs of tourists who are disabled in France (n = 25) and Canada (n = 24). The authors examine Canada’s and France’s accommodation to both domestic and international tourists who have disabilities, giving the study a unique perspective in comparing and contrasting results to the same questions across similar populations in two countries. The results indicate that neither country’s tourism industry has developed an effective policy to accommodate tourists who have disabilities indicated by significant barriers existing that exclude segments of the disabled population. This article takes the words of those with disabilities to recommend steps necessary to improve the tourism opportunities with this population.

The purpose of this exploratory study is to examine tourism-related social capital and its relationship with other forms of capital. The concept of social capital has emerged from several disciplines. Social capital has been used extensively among communities exploring a variety of economic development options, including sustainable agriculture and entrepreneurship. As part of a larger project, 307 tourism stakeholders in a four-county region of Virginia are identified and surveyed regarding their (1) perceptions of tourism-related social capital of the area and (2) perceptions of built, financial, natural, cultural, human, and political capital. Using structural equation modeling, analysis of the results shows that there is a relationship between length of residence and tourism-related social capital as well as a relationship between tourism-related social capital and cultural capital, political capital, human capital, private built capital, and financial capital, but no relationship exists between tourism-related social capital and public built capital or natural capital.

Emotion-carrying connotations are regarded as constituents of destination images. The connotative word items symptomatically associated with country names are likely to influence the emotional state and hence arousal level of Web users when browsing through tourism-related pages. The co-occurrence frequencies of connotative nouns and tourism-receiving country names in Web content serve as a basis for portraying the countries’ positions in connotative space. Transforming the raw frequencies into Normalized Google Distances makes them comparable. Automated data retrieval operates for the Web domain defined by “tourism OR tourist OR travel OR trip.” Visualizing the destination countries’ similarity in terms of Web-projected connotative profiles highlights one aspect of competitive threat. It is demonstrated with disjunctive and nondisjunctive hierarchical clustering, network analysis, and Sammon mapping.

Destinations are more likely to be successful if they recognize the experiential qualities of their offerings. However, with some exceptions, research into the emotional content of the destination experience remains largely underexplored. This current research addresses this lacuna and empirically investigates the dimensions of tourists’ emotional experiences toward hedonic holiday destinations. Adopting a rigorous scale development procedure, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses identify three salient dimensions to represent the Destination Emotion Scale, namely, joy, love, and positive surprise. In addition, tourists’ emotional experiences are related to satisfaction, which in turn has a significant influence on behavioral intentions. Findings offer important implications for destination marketers in relation to branding and emotional experience management.