SLOW TOURISM CONSUMERS’ RECOMMENDATIONS

Abstract

Tourism represents a sector in an economy within which consumers – tourists – readily share their personal impressions, thoughts, attitudes and experiences regarding a tourist offer. They do it through interpersonal communication, both face to face, i.e. offline, and with the aid of contemporary information and communication technologies, i.e. online. Such communication, referred to as Word of Mouth communication - WOM in Marketing literature, is considered to be the most reliable source of information about products and services. This paper presents the results of the research which links a special form of tourism – slow tourism with consumer motivations and one of the main outcomes of travel – consumer recommendations. The main aim of the study is to explore the influence of motivations on consumer recommendations as one of the outcomes of slow travel. Recommendations refer to interpersonal communication which is generated independently of business and occurs spontaneously between the consumers. The research was conducted on a sample of 320 respondents in the Republic of Serbia at the end of 2017. The data were analysed by one-factor analysis of variance (ANOVA).