Understanding luxury travel motivation of Chinese outbound travellers

In recent years. Chinese luxury consumers have been a biggest contributor to luxury market, specifically, with an emerging of Chinese middle class (annual income around AU$12,000 to AU$ 21,000), the young Chinese outbound luxury travellers demonstrated a strong desire and remarkable purchase power on luxury tourism. With limited academic studies regarding to luxury tourism, lack of current knowledge about their motivation, this thesis focused on luxury tourism consumption. Despite there are many previous studies on luxury consumption conducted in Western countries, research on Chinese luxury consumption is still insufficient. Moreover, there is also lack of attention on luxury tourism, even though destination marketers attach importance on luxury tourism. In order to address this limitation and extend the current knowledge, this thesis reviewed existing literature from psychology, marketing and tourism. Based on the self-concept theory and signalling theory, it is assumed that people are driven by their individual needs or group needs, tend to purchase the product to enhance their self-image or obtain their desired self-image. On the basis of these theories, the first objective of this thesis is to provide a clear definition of luxury tourism. It contributes to a clear framework what luxury tourism is. Prior studies related to tourism industries, for example, hotel and shopping industries, while there have contributed to knowledge of Chinese luxury tourism market, and found the needs for status are key motivation for luxury consumption. The second aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between motivation and willingness to undertake luxury travel based on a conceptual framework. This thesis identifies five key motivations, including travel bragging, conformist motivation, quality motivation, hedonic motivation and hedonic motivation. These five motivations are developed in Western countries, while this study test these five motivation in Chinese context. After removing the unquailed and incomplete response, the sample size in total is 509. Before the hypothesis testing, a factor analysis, including exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, were conducted to test the validity and reliability of the study. Then, the hypotheses of this study were mainly examined in the multiple regression. Results showed the needs for travel bragging, hedonic and quality have significant relationship with willingness to undertake luxury travel. The study admitted that the framework proposed in this thesis have similar constructs with Vigeneron and Johnson (2017) study, but differs it with item, scales, and sample use. In order words, this study contributes to provide a reliable framework that is valid in Chinese context. Further studies can replicate this framework and examine it. In addition, this study contributes to a new idea that conformist and uniqueness motivation are not influence Chinese willingness to undertake luxury travel. Further studies can be conducted to confirm this proposition. Moreover, interesting findings were presented that the relationship between the motivation and willingness to undertake luxury travel among different groups were different. Especially, conformist motivation had significant positive relationship on willingness to undertake luxury travel for the people with no past experience, while the uniqueness motivation had significant relationship on willingness to undertake luxury tourism for the people who have taken luxury tourism before. It provide practical implications for the destination marketers to provide different marketing strategies for different segments