Research On The Travel Experience Of Horseback Travelers Based On Grounded Theory

In recent years,sports tourism has been encouraged by national policies and the comprehensive impact of the improvement of the consumption power of tourists,showing great development potential.The arrival of experience economy also brings more opportunities for the development of sports tourism.As a new fashion sports tourism project,horseback travel is being sought after by more and more tourism groups.Compared with the hot horseback travel market,management investors on the management of emerging tourism projects also appeared a series of operational problems.It is an important issue how to develop sports tourism resources more reasonably and effectively and manage horseback tourism projects well.The fundamental way to explore these problems is to study the tourism experience of horseback travelers.Therefore,this study starts from the perspective of tourism experience,takes the tourism experience of horseback travelers as the research question,and focuses on exploring the main factors influencing the tourism experience of horseback travelers,their internal components,and the relationship between factors,as well as constructing the theoretical model of horseback travel experience.The mechanism of the model is further discussed,so as to provide suggestions and references for solving the operational management problems of horseback travel.In this study,literature,grounded theory qualitative research method,questionnaire survey and other research methods were used to investigate the travel experience of horseback travelers.Firstly,301 effective travel notes were collected through octopus crawler software,and the collected original data were carried out open encoding,spindle encoding and selective encoding according to the coding program of grounded theory.Finally,70 concepts,32 initial categories and 8 main categories were extracted.By sorting out the relationship between the main categories,a three-stage theoretical model of the horseback traveler’s travel experience is constructed.The core story line of the model is "factor--perception--behavior"."Factor" mainly includes the main category of service experience,scene experience,emotional experience,characteristic activities,route design;"Perception" represents that the main category is perceptual feedback;"Action" represents the main category as behavioral will.Finally,based on the travelogue data and coding results,a questionnaire was designed,and three parts were explained in depth with quantitative methods: first,the characteristics of the horseback traveler;Second,the influence relationship between the "factors" in the model;The third is the mechanism of the model(i.e.,"factor--perception--behavior").The empirical results show that:(1)the characteristics of horseback travelers in the survey are highly consistent with the description of travelogue samples;In terms of tourism motivation,entertainment and relaxation(mean =4.0617)> grassland riding(mean =4.0568)> cultural charm(mean =4.0444).(2)There was a significant correlation between the five factors in presence experience(P=0.000<0.01);Taking service experience,emotional experience,scene experience,characteristic activity and route design as independent variables,and taking the other four factors as dependent variables,the multivariate regression analysis shows that except the P value between characteristic activity and route design =0.209>0.05,the other P values are all less than 0.01,indicating that in addition to characteristic activity and route design,The other factors have significant positive influence on each other.(3)Characteristic activities,scene experience,service experience and emotional experience had positive and significant influence on perceptual feedback(P<0.05);Route design had a significant negative effect on perceptual feedback(P=0.010<0.01).Perceptual feedback had a positive and significant effect on behavioral intention(P=0.000<0.01).Based on the above results,this study draws the following conclusions: The horseback traveler travel experience model is composed of expectation experience,presence experience and recall experience,and the core story line is "factor--perception--behavior";The overall mechanism of the model is as follows: factors affect tourists’ perception,and perception further affects tourists’ recall behavior;Among the influencing factors,service experience has the highest influence on perceived feedback.Based on the research results and conclusions,this paper provides the following suggestions for horseback travel project operators:(1)Create differentiated products to meet the diversified motivation needs of horseback travelers.(2)Create good services and scenes to enhance the emotional experience of horseback travelers.(3)Attach importance to the role of special activities and create special tourism products for horseback travel.(4)Improve route design and innovate high-quality and reasonable horseback travel routes.