Incentive Travel Customer Participation Behavior Research

With the rapid development of China’s modern service industry and universalapplication of human-oriented thought to modern management，incentive travel of ourcountry shows great potential for development, as more and more enterprises useincentive travel as a management tool in order to achieve management goals.However, there are some problems that exist in practice, such as similar products, lackof depth develop and so on. And enterprises don’t clearly understand the meaning ofincentive travel, or the purpose of implementing incentive travel. These problems leadthat those enterprises are not satisfied the effect of incentive travel and a lowrepurchase rate.In the marketing circle, with the change of the core concepts of marketingmanagement, scholars began to pay more attention to the role of customerparticipation in the innovation of product, especially in the service sector，incentivetravel as a highly customized product, if enterprises look forward to achieve goodquality of service, customer participation is essential. Therefore, studying on customerparticipation of incentive travel with the theory of customer participation theory,risk-taking and quality of service is very meaningful. Based on the literature reviewand the in-depth interviews with travel agencies and enterprise customer, this paperconstructs a general model of customer participation of incentive travel, and perceivedrisk, need for uniqueness and customer knowledge are the antecedent variables ofcustomer participation, quality of service and behavioral intention are the outcomevariables. Then the author combines the characteristics of incentive travel to designthe questionnaire. And in this paper，the author also study customer participation as amediator between the antecedent variables and the outcome variables.Through questionnaires, the author interviewed107enterprises who bought theservice of incentive travel from travel agencies in Shanghai, Making use of statisticalanalysis sotfware, this study does the empirical research of the theoretical model. Theresults show that psychological risk(PR) is positively associated with preparation(BR), Customer Participation as an Information Resource(CPI), Customer Participation as aCo-developer(CPC), interpersonal interaction(PI) and interference(IB), performancerisk(FP) is positively associated with interference(IB), Need for uniqueness(UQ) has apositive impact on preparation(BR)，CPC, and interpersonal interaction(PI) andinterference(IB). Customer knowledge(KN) positively affect preparation(BR), CPI,CPC and interference(IB).To quality of service, CPC, interpersonal interaction(PI)and interference(IB) positively effect reliability(R), preparation(BR)，CPI, CPC andinterference(IB) are positively associated with both assurance(A) and empathy(E).The results also show that customer patricipation play an intermediary role betweenpsychological risk(PR) and reliability(R), assurance(A), and between customerknowledge(KN) and assurance(A), empathy(E). In addition, findings show thatquality of service has a positive impact on behavioral intention which is consistentwith the research conclusions of many scholars.Finally，according to the conclusions, this study presents the correspondingmanagement proposals for travel agencies and enterprise customers, and points outthe shortage of this study and the expectation of the future research.