How tourists' experience of value co-creation affects their green behaviors? The mediating role of STE and QOL

Abstract

Introduction:In recent decades, sustainable development has always been a core topic for the world’s tourism industry besides growing number of researches focus on this area. On the one hand, the rapid rise of mass tourism and the negative behaviors due to tourists’ uncivilized deeds lead to adverse impacts on destinations. It is significant to explore how tourists could contribute to sustainable tourism through taking responsible environmental behaviors. On the other hand, rare literature has concentrated on tourists’ green behaviors, not to say consider it from the value co-creation perspective. Therefore, the study of tourists’ green behavior from a value co-creation perspective would better understand sustainable tourism. Based on service dominant logic, SOR theory, and bottom-up spillover theory, this study aims to examine the interactive relationships among tourists’ value co-creation experience (with the service provider), satisfaction with travel experience (STE), quality of life (QOL), and green behaviors. A model set value co-creation experience as an antecedent, STE and QOL as mediators and green behaviors as outcome variables was developed. Methods:600 Chinese tourists older than 18 years old were surveyed at Wenjuanxing, an online platform for distributing questionnaires. Scales evaluating those constructs were drawn from previous researches in top journals. SPSS 23.0 and Mplus7.0 were used to analyze the data and test the SEM model. Results:The results showed that tourists’ value co-creation experience directly influenced their STE and QOL, while value co-creation experience only had an indirect effect on green behaviors. Both STE and QOL positively affected green behaviors, and STE had a positive impact on QOL. In addition, STE and QOL partially mediated the relationship between value co-creation experience and green behaviors. Discussion: The existing researches mainly consider the behaviors of hotel guests and ecotourists, ignoring mass tourists’ green behavior, this study fills this gap.