Visitors' engagement and authenticity: Japanese heritage consumption

Derek Bryce, Ross Curran, Kevin O'Gorman and Babak Taheri

Tourism Management, 2015, vol. 46, issue C, 571-581

Abstract: Understanding the sense of authenticity of heritage attractions is important for tourism management and marketing because presentation, interpretation and verification has a direct bearing on motivations to visit and engage with heritage tourism sites. This paper establishes relationships among the concepts of culturally specific motivation, perception of authenticity, engagement and attendant behavioral consequences based on domestic visitors' experiences at Japanese heritage sites. It further extends Kolar and Zabkar's (2010) model of authenticity by including concepts of serious leisure, heritage related behaviors, self-connection and their effects over engagement using Partial Least Square, whereby both formative and reflective scales are included. The structural model is tested with a sample of 768 visitors in a culturally specific setting of Japanese heritage sites. The empirical validation of the conceptual model supports the research hypotheses. These findings contribute to a better understanding of visitors' perceptions and valuation of authenticity in Japanese tourist attractions. Several implications can be drawn from the study findings and interesting directions for future research are provided.

Keywords: Authenticity; Engagement; Japan; Heritage; Loyalty; Preconceived notions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261517714001642

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:touman:v:46:y:2015:i:c:p:571-581

DOI: 10.1016/j.tourman.2014.08.012

Access Statistics for this article

Tourism Management is currently edited by Chris Ryan

More articles in Tourism Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().