Taiwan Tourism Research

Honour Project Introduction

The research question of this honour project is ‘What are the factors influencing Hong Kong young adults, aged between 18 to 24, to travel to Taiwan for leisure holidays?’ The aim of this research is to find out the motivational factors influencing Hong Kong young adults to visit Taiwan for pleasure purposes. And then recommend what elements could be included in Taiwan travel packages to attract Hong Kong young adults. The research objectives are to explore Hong Kong young adults’ willingness/ level of interests of travelling to Taiwan; to determine the motivating factors motivating this age group to travel; and to investigate the perceptions of this market segment about Taiwan as a holiday destination.

I am exploring

Dann (1977) suggests that there are pull and push factors can be the motives that motivate people to travel. Most discussions of tourism motivation have inclined to circle around the push and pull concepts (Crompton, 1979). Push factors for a vacation are socio-psychological motives. For example, a person is tired from work and he wants a vacation for relaxation and relief himself from work. Here, tiredness is a push factor to push him to go on vacation. Push factors have been used for explaining one’s desire to go travelling, while pull factors have been used to determine the choice of a specific destination, i.e. why destination A but destination B. For example, the relaxation, sun and beach of Maldives attract the tired man to travel to there, sun and beach are the pull motives of Maldives towards him. Psychological factor plays an important role in the relationship between push and pull motives. This is because both push and pull motives are about emotions, to a large extent. From the above example, the push factor (tiredness) is an emotion, and the pull factor (relaxation) is an emotion as well. As for this research, the push and pull motives of Hong Kong young adults to visit Taiwan could be assumed is similar to the example above. This is because, according to the statistics from Taiwan Tourism Bureau, 85% of

It is another important element to motivate tourists to visit the particular destination. It plays a very central role to affect both new and existed customers. Destination image has positive impacts on consumers’ pre-purchasing considerations, their satisfaction level, attitudes towards the destination, repatronage intention, and also word of mouth (Chon, 1990; Echtner and Ritchie, 1993). Destination image can be measured by the destination’s nature, cultural or festival attractions, entertainment, food and beverage, transportation, climate, safety, service quality, accessibility and local residents’ culture and friendliness to the tourists (Gallarza et al, 2002). Towards destination image, first-time visitors have different perceptions from repeats visitors. First-time visitors are more likely to be younger and tend to seek variety and new cultural experiences than repeat visitors (Gitelson and Crompton, 1984). On the other hand, repeat visitors tend to reconfirm from their previous experience in the destination, especially when they had negative feelings or unsatisfied experiences (Fakeye and Crompton, 1991). Hoffman and Low (1981) find out that the openness and friendliness of the local residents of a destination has an influence on the visitor’s image towards the destination. The friendlier the residents, the more