Tour Itineraries Research Articles

Value drivers and adventure tourism

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the drivers of customer value, and their respective relationships with customer satisfaction and behavioral intentions, between two culturally distinct groups of adventure tourists.Design/methodology/approachThe study adopted a descriptive design and compared data from 301 Japanese and Western adventure tourists who experienced the same adventure tour. The respondents were split into two groups, and a path modeling approach was used to examine similarities and differences.FindingsThe results indicated that Japanese tourists attached more importance to emotional value and novelty value. Western tourists, however, attached relatively more importance to the utilitarian dimension of price value for money.Practical implicationsThe main implication of this study is that tourism operators should account for differences in value perceptions between Japanese and Western tourists when planning tour operations, training tour guides, and managing tour itineraries. Operators should also consider customizing their tour products to fit the specific needs of these different cultural groups. This reinforces the adaptation argument when marketing tourism to international consumers.Originality/valueThis study highlights that different value drivers affect the satisfaction and behavioral intentions of Japanese tourists, relative to Western tourists. The need for adaptation of tourism products toward certain international tourists is thus necessary. The research also reinforces the importance of conceptualizing and measuring customer value as a multidimensional construct in an international adventure tourism context.

Destination Marketing to Promote Tea Tourism Socio-Economic Approach on Community Development

IntroductionTravel & Tourism is one of the world's largest service sector industry where providing billions of employments for different sectors and regions as international tourist arrivals grew by 4.4% in 2015 to reach a total of 1,184 million in 2015 (UNWTO World Tourism Barometer). With the gradual development of the tourism sector, people willing to engage in new tourism experiences and concepts as niche tourism emerged as a new concept (Fernando, 2015; Fernando 2014). Where niche tourism refers to how a specific tourism product can be personalized to meet the needs of a particular tourist segment as tourism has been identified as one niche Tourism segment emerged. Tourism noticeably has the potential to enhance the brand image and marketing of tea-producing destinations as contemporary tourists seek out authentic and unique experiences related to the appreciation and consumption of the beverage. Tourism related to tea encourages both consumption and the development of relationships with potential customers as not harming the estates but provide double income ( Fernando et al.,2016). Ceylon Tea and Tourism are inseparable words as tea growing areas are undoubtedly the most beautiful places as well attractive tourism destinations within in Sri Lanka (Ceylon Land, 2013). is farmed in over 30 countries of the world including Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, and Turkey although the India, China, and Sri Lanka work out 60% of the total production according to Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO, 2012). Climatic and geographic conditions of Sri Lanka have formed appropriate possibility for tea cultivation as historical evidences proved that tea tree has a long history dated back to the late 19th Century. Further trails have been included in most of the tour packages offered by the travel agencies in their tour itineraries. Potentials for the development of the segment is enormous with the strengths as the tourism industry needs to push to strengthen tourism being practiced to day to reap the optimum results and benefits, particularly with regard to the focused marketing efforts aimed at the high spending visitors. a new paradigm need to be introduced to focus more on Tourism income rather to increase the tourists' arrivals as the set of post-war peaceful situation of the destination (Fernando,2015). Improving this Tourism niche market the steps could be taken for promotion and development Tourism as a novel avenue that ultimately improves the livelihood of the community.Research QuestionsTea is one of the main resources that can promote as niche tourism segment in Sri Lanka as the amount of tea plantations and world renowned brand Ceylon Tea. tourism is a type of tourism concept which can be promoted in Sri Lanka, Specially in Nuwaraeilya and Badulla as plantations are widely spread in both districts. Hence this paper highlights the impact on community from tourism.* How is the community participation in tea tourism?* What are the community opinions for future tea tourism?Research Objectives has been developed* To identify how is the community participation in tea tourism.* To identify community opinions for future tea tourism.Review of LiteratureThe offering of a cup of tea is a universal sign of hospitality, in either a home or commercial hospitality setting (Walton, 2001). Practitioners recognize that tea offered in the lodging setting is an and that the current evolution of tea into a trendy product is not a surprise. For hospitality, tea consequently serves as both a symbol and a resource with considerable potential for the provision of commercial hospitality as the tea culture in china revolves around creating a comfortable and positive experience for guests. has been a part of the history and economy of Sri Lanka since it was introduced in the late nineteenth century, after the failure of the coffee crop due to a fungus (Martin, 2007). …

Towards Next Generation Touring: Personalized Group Tours

Recommending and planning tour itineraries are challenging and time-consuming for tourists, hence they may seek tour operators for help. Traditionally tour operators have offered standard tour packages of popular locations, but these packages may not cater to tourist's interests. In addition, tourists may want to travel in a group, e.g., extended family, and want an operator to help them. We introduce the novel problem of group tour recommendation (GroupTourRec), which involves many challenges: forming tour groups whose members have similar interests; recommending Points-of-Interests (POI) that form the tour itinerary and cater for the group's interests; and assigning guides to lead these tours. For each challenge, we propose solutions involving: clustering for tourist groupings; optimizing a variant of the Orienteering problem for POI recommendations; and integer programming for tour guide assignments. Using a Flickr dataset of seven cities, we compare our proposed approaches against various baselines and observe significant improvements in terms of interest similarity, total/maximum/minimum tour interests and total tour guide expertise.

The structures and flows of a large tourist itinerancy network

This paper undertakes a detailed network analysis (NA) of the structures and flows of a large tourist itinerancy network emerging in six Southeast Asian countries, developed by aggregating 1668 tour itineraries accessed from 149 tour marketing websites. The analysis includes the examination of the network and of seven extracted subnetworks (modules). It identifies various macro-patterns in the network influenced by scale freeness, preferential attachment, and growth. It proposes that a small number of nodes and edges form supercores. These dynamical elements influence the network's emergence, which is occurring without central coordination. A network backbone formed by these supercores emphasizes the flows in the network. The implications are visualized by several conceptual models of tourist and related resource and revenue flows. It identifies that a basin and sink topology, which drains flows from the periphery towards a network backbone sink, is consistent with preferential attachment processes in the network. This paper assists in turning NA in tourism from textile metaphors towards research centred upon empirical relational data. In this case, it exposes a network emerging from the inherent physical connectedness of tourism.

Evaluating Bloemfontein’s image as a tourist destination: A tour operator’s perspective

Tour operators have been identified as vital information sources influencing the images and decision-making processes of tourists. Bloemfontein is situated in Central South Africa. Tourism marketers believe that the city is an ideal stopover destination for national tour operators en route to other destinations. Research was conducted among national tour operators in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town to determine their perceptions of Bloemfontein and whether they regard the city as a tourist or stopover destination. The research indicates that the city is not regarded as a tourist destination, but is seen as an ideal stopover destination which could be included in future tour itineraries. It is currently excluded because operators are unfamiliar with the tourism offering(s) of Bloemfontein due to insufficient marketing by the tourism officials of the city.

Touring Circuits and the Geography of Rock Music Performance

There are significant cultural differences among music audiences in different locations. Such geographic differences in the propensity to consume new popular music will have an impact on the choices artists and their managers make about where to perform live concerts. We suggest that the popularity of particular places on touring circuits operates as a proxy for the cultural sophistication of the place. Moreover, various locational factors also play a role in where performances take place. In this article, we explore how tour itineraries in the United States and Canada create urban cultural and spatial hierarchies and vice versa. The data source to establish these hierarchies is Celebrity Access, an online industry source in which large amounts of touring information are available. We include more than 12,000 concerts played during a two-year period (2006–08), mainly by alternative rock artists, in the analysis.

INFLUENCES ON SOUVENIR BUYING INTENTIONS OF TOURISTS IN CRAFTS-RICH REGIONS

Souvenirs provide a tangible evidence of the travel experience. Souvenir purchase has been considered as an important component of tourism shopping. This has implications for tourism marketers and local artisans of regions that have a significant repertoire of traditional handicrafts/handloom products and may be regarded as craft-rich regions. The primary purpose of this study is to examine the souvenir purchase intentions of tourist segments to one such region - Northeast India. It aims to assess whether the intention to purchase souvenirs differs according to the type of tourist. The influence of travel motivations, activity preferences, demographics and certain trip-related factors on souvenir purchase intentions is examined. Using factor-cluster segmentation approach, three motive-based segments and three activity-based segments have been derived. Findings indicate that these segments differ with respect to purchase of souvenir. However, among the demographic and trip-related factors examined, only age and travel frequency are found to have an influence on intentions to purchase souvenirs. Tourism retailers of the region could benefit from such knowledge and may develop travel packages/ tour itineraries to cater to the interests of specific segments of tourists.

WHERE IS AMERICA IN THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS?

Where is America in the republic of letters? This question has formed in my mind over the last four years as I have collaborated on a new project based at Stanford University called Mapping the Republic of Letters. The project aims to enrich our understanding of the intellectual networks of major and minor figures in the republic of letters, the international world of learning that spanned the centuries roughly from 1400 to 1800. By creating visual images based on large digitized data sets, we hope to reveal the hidden structures and conditions that nourished the growth of the republic of letters in the early modern era and the causes of its transformation in the nineteenth century. This task has only recently become feasible with the digitization of the correspondences of major intellectuals such as Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, Athanasius Kircher, and Voltaire, and of libraries, cabinets of artifacts, and Grand Tour itineraries.

Using Fuzzy Preference Method for Group Package Tour Based on the Risk Perception

This study explores group package tour (GPT) itineraries based on comparative risk methodology using the fuzzy Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE). It combines the concepts of fuzzy sets to represent the uncertain information in intrinsic risks with PROMETHEE, a subgroup of Multi-Criteria Decision Making methods. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 GPT leaders, this study identifies comprehensive intrinsic risk factors. Furthermore, this study compares the risk perceptions associated with 12 factors by applying traditional PROMETHEE and fuzzy PROMETHEE methods to four itineraries. The PROMETHEE method can be used when the input data are numeric and crisp. The fuzzy PROMETHEE method is preferred when substantial uncertainties and subjectivities exist in GPT itinerary information. Finally, several academic and managerial implications about GPT tour risk controls are outlined.

Day tour itineraries: Searching for the balance between commercial needs and experiential desires

Little research has been conducted examining the factors that influence the development of day tour itineraries. While the literature suggests that a combination of commercial, operational, political and experiential factors contribute to itinerary development, this article argues that it is the business model chosen that affects it the most. Essentially two business models predominate: commission-based and noncommission-based. This study examines the impact of the business model on the selection of day tour itineraries in the Macau Special Administrative Region of China. It finds that experiential values are traded off almost entirely in the itineraries of commission-based tours, while a better balance between experiential and operational considerations drives itinerary choices for noncommission-based tours.

Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures (review)

Reviewed by: Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures S. Timothy Maloney Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures. By Tim Page. Richmond Hill, ON; Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books, 2007. [192 p. ISBN: 9781554072897. $29.95.] Illustrations, facsimiles. Billing itself as “the first photographic treatment of the life of one of the greatest and most fascinating musicians of all time,” this book was conceived to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of Glenn Gould’s birth, and was first published in hardback under the same title by Doubleday in Toronto in 2002. The current edition is a softcover reprint published in 2007, which presumably makes it a seventy-fifth anniversary tribute, though no changes were made to the original texts. A brief foreword by the 1999 laureate of the Glenn Gould Prize in Music and Communications, Yo-Yo Ma, extols Gould’s “ability to create breathtaking new sound worlds from his own deep understanding of the abstract,” and lauds the “legacy of his imagination.” A lengthier essay by the Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic, Tim [End Page 768] Page, provides a biographical sketch of Gould and attempts to interpret and place into a broader context the salient features of his career. For example, after asking, “Has anybody ever possessed ten fingers with ten such marvelously independent lives?” (p. 14), Page suggests that Gould “made some of the best recordings of his time and . . . a few of the worst” (p. 15). Interspersed as marginalia throughout Page’s introductory text and occasionally thereafter are images of some of the thousands of documents preserved among the Glenn Gould Papers at the Library and Archives Canada. Gould was a pack-rat who kept everything from shopping lists, broadcast scripts, and drafts of outgoing correspondence (sent and unsent), to blood-pressure logs, tour itineraries, baggage tags, and hotel and rental car keys. Included in this selection are a Mother’s Day card hand-made by the youthful Gould, a letter from Queen Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting acknowledging the Queen’s interest in “the little Canadian boy who is such a clever musician,” images of the covers of his first keyboard tutor and various recordings he made, concert programs and publicity flyers and posters, his lifetime membership card to the National Anti-Vivisection Society (attesting to his great concern for animals: he eventually left half his estate to the Toronto Humane Society), and the mimeographed note he displayed in his dressing rooms and handed out to fans during his nine-year career as a touring artist discouraging them from trying to shake his hand. Among the over 200 black-and-white photos that make up this Life in Pictures are many previously unpublished images of Gould, ranging from family snapshots to candid and formal publicity photos by Don Hunstein, whose portraits graced the covers of the ninety-plus Gould LPs issued by Columbia Masterworks (now Sony Classical), by Harold Whyte and Herb Nott for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and by other Canadian photographers, including Robert Ragsdale, Paul Rockett, Henri Rossier, Dan Weiner, and Gaby, who were engaged at various times by Gould’s own management or by a succession of concert societies, festivals, newspapers, and symphony orchestras. They are organized into four chronological sections entitled “Overture,” “Bursting Forth,” “New Horizons,” and “Envoi.” Acknowledgements, sources, and a listing of permissions follow a five-page chronology of the major points in Gould’s life and career that rounds out the volume. Missing from this collection are photos of Gould by Yousuf Karsh, presumably because his estate tightly controls all use of his photographs by third parties, and by Jock Carroll, whose own book, Glenn Gould: Some Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man (Toronto: Stoddart, 1995), sparked a lawsuit brought by the Estate of Glenn Gould, which claimed copyright infringement based on its assertion of complete control of all usage of the name and likeness of Gould. The Estate lost both the original trial and the appeal, and one senses that this Life in Pictures publication, a project officially underwritten by the Estate, may have been its attempt to head off additional photo books that might be contemplated by any of the above-named or other photographers. Notwithstanding the...

Unsere Rockgruppe geht auf Tournee! A Collaborative Writing Project for the Intermediate Level

This is a collaborative writing project that is ideally suited for introducing longer narrative writing to second‐year students. It involves collaborative learning, group dynamics and extended narrative writing. In the Rockgruppe‐Semesterprojekt, groups of students form fictional rock bands, develop tour itineraries through the German‐speaking countries, and write competing narrative descriptions of their tour. These narratives undergo a multi‐tiered editorial process and form the basis of group presentations. Completing the Rockgruppe project facilitates student progress in the language‐learning standards of communication, cultures and connections. It also always proves to be a great deal of fun.

Case Studies of the Experiences of Chinese Visitors to Three Tourist Attractions in Victoria, Australia

China is expected to become the largest inbound source market to Australia and many other destinations including Europe, possibly in less than a decade. However, the Chinese government tightly controls outbound travel via a number of mechanisms such as limiting travel to selected destinations through its Approved Destination Status scheme, predetermining tour itineraries, and requiring travellers to be accompanied by a tour guide for virtually their entire overseas experience. This paper draws on cultural and tourist mediation theory to deconstruct the Chinese visitor experience at three specific tourism attractions in the State of Victoria: Sovereign Hill (a recreated historic site located in a regional urban centre), Phillip Island (a nature‐based destination), and Royal Botanic Gardens (a metropolitan‐based non‐commercial attraction). Data collected from multiple sources are used to provide an in‐depth analysis of how the visitor's experience is mediated at these three sites. Focusing in particular on ‘memorable experiences’ as a construct, data collected via a questionnaire‐based visitor survey, interviews and on‐site observations are used to draw conclusions about the visitor's experience at each of the three sites as well as their collective experience. Generally speaking, the Chinese visitor's spatial and temporal experience is not a particularly good one. Visitors report the most memorable things at the three attractions as mainly related to the cognitive and affective dimensions of the experience and, where the opportunities presented themselves, the encounters with locals. The findings suggest that attention be given not only to providing physical access to spaces and places, but also access to opportunities for understanding, appreciation, and interaction. Responsibility for providing access falls largely on the shoulders of the Chinese‐speaking tour guides, who serve as the main point of contact between the destination and their Chinese clients. While improvement to itineraries and written communication is important, the findings suggest that for this market, the focus should be on the tour guides who play the key role in mediating the experiences of Chinese visitors at tourism attractions.

THE CULTURAL TOUR ROUTE: A JOURNEY OF THE IMAGINATION?

Organized tours are one of the main ways that tourists experience cultural destinations. They are often described as ``a destination bubble,'' conveying a sense of isolation rather than involvement. The extent to which tour participants interact with and learn about destinations is not well understood, although the acquisition of knowledge is frequently cited as significant in peoples' decisions to travel by this mode. This article investigates cultural tour participants' experiences, and specifically addresses the extent to which participants' images of their destinations change or remain unaltered after their visit. The empirical research employed route mapping to elicit information about tour members' knowledge before and after touring. Ireland was selected because it presented elements common to many nonspecialized cultural tour itineraries. A multimethod approach combined qualitative and quantitative techniques in the analyses of the route maps, and triangulated the findings with those from focused interviews and participant observation. The study found that tourists' images changed in magnitude as the tour had enforced already well-defined images. It concludes that future work focusing on the critical prepurchase period in the destination\n\image formation process would contribute to this area of research.

The Impact of Participation in Activities while on Vacation on Seniors' Psychological Well-Being: A Path Model Application

This article extends earlier research regarding the relationships between senior travelers' participation in activities while on vacation, their overall satisfaction with their travel experiences, and their psychological well-being. A path model was developed to depict the direct and indirect relationships between these variables by using a sample of senior tourists traveling on North American escorted tour itineraries. Whereas the direct effect accounted for 98% of the relationships between the senior tourists'levels of participation in activities and their psychological well-being, the indirect effect was negligible. The study concluded that senior tourists'activity levels were significantly related to their psychological well-being, but their satisfaction with the tours was not.