Local Residents Becoming Local Tourists: Value Co-Creation in Chinese Wetland Parks during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Despite their ecological value, wetland parks can be expensive to preserve and maintain, so local governments endeavor to design financially sustainable models by exploiting the ecotourism value of wetland parks. This trend has been facilitated by telecommunication technologies that enable value co-creation. Unlike previous studies that primarily assume tourists to be outsiders far from home, this study addresses a unique situation: travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic generated a unique ecotourism market for local residents. This study responds to the above issue by examining the factors responsible for local tourists’ value co-creation intention. Specifically, we drew on the theory of planned behavior to develop an extended model to address the research objective. The hypothesized model was empirically tested using an online survey of 386 local tourists who traveled to a wetland park in the Liangping district of Chongqing, China. Our results suggest that social norms, destination awareness, experience expectations, and facilitating conditions could affect local tourists’ attitudes, which further influences local customers’ value co-creation intention. Moreover, social norms, destination awareness, and experience expectations could affect local tourists’ perceived value of a wetland park, thus further influencing local customers’ value co-creation intention. In doing so, we made interesting insights and implications for ecotourism at a local level. Drawing on our survey in a specific wetland park, we highlight how local tourists’ attitude and perceived value positively affect their value co-creation intention and identify one more possible source of destination awareness: friends’ sharing of destination information and experience through social media. Practically, we suggest local tourism to offset the maintenance costs of wetland parks during the COVID-19 pandemic. That requires leveraging social norms and understanding residents’ expectations, in addition to improving infrastructure.