An Empirical Study On The Constituent Factors Of Visitors' Experience And Their Internal Mechanism

Individuation, consumption emotion and servicescape design are the three fundamental concepts within the studies on the consumer experiences and the practices of experience marketing. Taking the visitors' experience with the tourist attractions as the study object, this paper focuses on the phenomenological demonstrations of the three concepts mentioned above and their internal mechanism by integrating qualitative and quantitative research methods.Based on the comprehensive reviews of previous theoretical and empirical studies on the consumer experience and focusing on the unique characters of visitors' experience, this paper investigates three main components of visitors' experience with the tourist attractions, i.e., tourist attraction service quality, visitors' emotional experience and visitors' behavioral intentions as well as its moderate variables, and endeavors to construct an integrated theory to illuminate the internal mechanism of these constituent factors. The study includes nine chapters and adopts multiple research methods, such as grounded theory approach, content analysis, factor analysis and regression analysis.As for the visitors' emotional experience, this study proposes a two-level hierarchy classification of the visitors' experience emotion and distinctive dimensionality division for each level. For the lower level, this study presents a "motivation-arousal-immersion" model (abbr. AIA model) to demonstrate the three distinct factors of visitors' experience emotion during the touring process and cover the shortage of extant visitors' experience emotion studies. For the high level, this study puts forward four factors, i.e., satisfaction, delight, pleasure and negative affect, to demonstrate visitors' experience affect during or after the touring process. This empirical result enriches the extant studies on the dimensionality division of the consumption affect. In all, the study on the visitors' emotional experience will help the operators to select specific kind of administration for diverse tourist attractions or visitor segments with different emotional experiences. As for the tourist attraction service quality, the study presents a two-level and night-factor (the first level) dimensionality division. The empirical result is a potent integration of the extant service quality studies and draws much from significant practice of China's standard of rating for quality of tourist attractions. Moreover, the typical quality factor of tourist attractions, such as social factor, reflects the distinct characters of visitors' experience especially. In all, the study on the tourist attraction service quality will do benefit for the operators to develop a comprehensive understanding of visitors' experience and change mind from total quality management to visitors' experience management.As for the visitors' behavioral intentions, the study makes a three-factor dimensionality division, i.e., positive word of mouth (WOM) and revisit, conditional preference, and negative WOM and inertia, reflecting the distinct characters of visitors' experience and integrating the internet WOM into the measurement system of the visitors' behavioral intentions. This empirical result reminds the operators valuing highly the WOM channels management and paying much attention to the social quality factor and emotional experience management. Furthermore, the test of the moderation effects of two psychological variables, i.e., visitors' variety seeking intention and visitors' involvement degree, complements the whole theory about visitors' experience raised by this paper and warn the operators not making market segmentation only according to demographic variables.The study cites more than 600 references and essentially covers the significant literatures of the related research areas. The reviews on the consumer satisfaction definition and dimensionality, on the service quality definition and dimensionality, and on the five contentions within consumption affect, lay the theoretical foundation of this study and indicate the further research direction as well.In brief, based on Chinese visitor study sample this paper not only examines the extant consumer experience theory but also shows a discovery process of localization concepts. The theoretical and empirical results can provide some useful advices for the operators of tourist attractions, and manifest the regurgitation-feeding of visitors' experience study to the extant consumer experience theory. Certainly, this study is much an exploratory research and its conclusions await to be further tested.