Abstract
Emotion is an important motivation and experience for tourists, and awe is one of the most anticipated emotional experiences in the travel sector. Previous studies of awe have focused on the natural environment and cultural landscapes, but little research has been conducted on awe in relation to intangible cultural heritage. The current study constructs a research framework that explores the relationship between involvement, experience quality, and loyalty. We adopted a self-administered questionnaire to survey visitors who engaged with the beliefs and customs associated with the sea goddess Mazu on Meizhou Island, China. A total of 450 questionnaires were distributed, and 393 valid questionnaires were returned. Through analysis of the response data, we established that awe is an outcome variable of involvement and experience quality, as well as an antecedent variable of loyalty. Moreover, our findings verify the mediating role of awe between involvement and loyalty, and between experience quality and loyalty. In addition, through a multigroup analysis of male and female tourists, we found a significant difference in the influence of awe on loyalty between the genders. This study is the first to examine awe in relation to intangible cultural heritage, and its findings have valuable practical implications.
Highlights
“Intangible cultural heritage” (ICH) is recognized as an indication of an important property of human civilization
By December 2018, 40 projects in China had been inscribed on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO’s) Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage, and, currently, almost all of those ICH projects have been undertaken in concert with different levels of tourism development
Few previous studies have carried out research on awe in this context, instead focusing on religious beliefs (Van Cappellen & Saroglou, 2012), such as religious temples or royal palaces; the natural environment (Keltner & Haidt, 2003), such as mountains, seas, rivers, and other aspects of the landscape; artistic creation (Juslin, 2013), such as music, art, and dance; human-made wonders (Fingerhut & Prinz, 2018), like the Great Wall of China and the Egyptian pyramids; and major social changes (Barlett et al, 2008)
Summary
“Intangible cultural heritage” (ICH) is recognized as an indication of an important property of human civilization. Given the current vigorous development of ICH tourism, it is necessary and valuable to explore such awe in terms of the emotional experience of tourists. This would provide an extension of existing research on the sense of awe, rendering the research theory about awe more widely applicable. Another contribution of our study is that we try to understand how awe affects behavior during an ICH experience. Bloemer and De Ruyter (1999) contended that involvement is an antecedent variable of emotional response, which, in the present context, affects the experience quality of visitors. By exploring the interrelationships between the abovementioned constructs, we propose to expand existing theory and provide practical inspiration and suggestions for the management and marketing of ICH tourism
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