An empirical study of a theoretical model of leisure travel destination selection process: A case of Hong Kong and Taiwan

The decision-process theory describes a sequence of factors that lead to purchase behaviour and hypothesizes the relationship of these factors to behaviour and to each other. This study applied the decision-process theory to a tourism setting. It was reported in the tourism literature that potential tourists spend appreciable time and effort on vacation planning which is a complex process involving at least an individual's perception, previous experience. motivation, information search, and attitudes. Except a few studies on the Japanese, nothing has been reported on tourists from other parts of Asia. The increased representation of visitors from Asian countries in Australia has required a greater sensitivity to cultural variations in their needs and the implications for service provision. The purpose of this study was to develop a theoretical model based on the decision-process theory to enhance understanding of the leisure travel destination selection process; and to investigate the relationships between specific components of the model using representative tourists samples from Hong Kong and Taiwan for hypotheses testing. An initial sample of 1224 subjects was screened on four criteria to yield a sample of 925 who were requested to respond to a questionnaire. The 618 completed surveys (Hong Kong = 316; Taiwan = 302) represented a response rate of 66.8%. The perceived importance of 13 destination attributes was factor-analyzed following the principal component factor analysis with varimax rotation procedure. The analysis resulted in four factors which explained 54.8% of the variance in the Hong Kong data and 55.8% in the Taiwan data. The four factors were identified as services and facilities, natural attractions, price and distance, and friends and relatives. Logistic regression analysis was used to test the model for prediction of intention to return to a holiday destination. An individual traveler's intention to return to a holiday destination was found significantly related to the individual's level of satisfaction experienced for some specific destination attributes at his/her last visit to that particular destination. Overall, results of the study supported the hypotheses on relationships between components of the model. There were significant differences between the perceived importance of destination attributes and perception of Australia of Hong Kong and Taiwanese travelers