An Exploration of Recreational Crowding on Texas Inland Waterways

Perceived crowding is an important issue influencing recreationists' satisfaction with their nature-based leisure experiences. Past work, however, has consistently revealed that crowding accounts for a conspicuously low level of variation in satisfaction. Central to the concerns are intervening factors between perceived crowding and satisfaction, the mechanisms by which recreationists employ to cope with perceived crowding, and other drivers of the crowding- satisfaction relationship. Given this, I explored two questions related to recreationists’ perceptions of crowding within the context of boating in central Texas. First, what are some additional crowding-related factors that contribute to recreationists’ satisfaction with their experiences? My findings revealed that expectations of encounters with other boaters contributed a large portion to the variance in satisfaction. Second, how does recreationists’ attachment to the resource influence their choice of coping strategy in response to perceived crowding? In an effort to answer this question, I investigated the moderating role of place attachment in recreationists’ selection of coping mechanisms in response to perceived crowding. I found that for respondents who had a higher level of place attachment, the likelihood of adopting temporal substitution, direct action, or activity substitution was higher than for respondents who have lower place attachment

An Exploration of Recreational Crowding on Texas Inland Waterways

Perceived crowding is an important issue influencing recreationists' satisfaction with their nature-based leisure experiences. Past work, however, has consistently revealed that crowding accounts for a conspicuously low level of variation in satisfaction. Central to the concerns are intervening factors between perceived crowding and satisfaction, the mechanisms by which recreationists employ to cope with perceived crowding, and other drivers of the crowding- satisfaction relationship. Given this, I explored two questions related to recreationists’ perceptions of crowding within the context of boating in central Texas. First, what are some additional crowding-related factors that contribute to recreationists’ satisfaction with their experiences? My findings revealed that expectations of encounters with other boaters contributed a large portion to the variance in satisfaction. Second, how does recreationists’ attachment to the resource influence their choice of coping strategy in response to perceived crowding? In an effort to answer this question, I investigated the moderating role of place attachment in recreationists’ selection of coping mechanisms in response to perceived crowding. I found that for respondents who had a higher level of place attachment, the likelihood of adopting temporal substitution, direct action, or activity substitution was higher than for respondents who have lower place attachment

Drivers of Satisfaction with Chinese Hotels

Hotel reviews provide important opportunities for researching the components of hotel experiences and related guest satisfaction. The study presented in this paper explored what factors are generally mentioned in hotel reviews and if and how specific comments could be linked to overall satisfaction ratings and behavioral intentions. Chinese hotels were selected to form the context of the study as insights on experience elements and satisfaction are especially important in an emerging hospitality market. A total of 983 reviews posted by international travelers were content analyzed. Experience components mentioned in the reviews were then linked to satisfaction ratings, review sentiment and behavioral intentions expressed in the reviews. Implications for tourism experience theory, future research, and hospitality management practice are discussed

Creating Experiences for Study-Abroad Tourists

Effects of tourist activity type and locus of activity structure on subjective experiences of study-abroad tourists were examined. Subjective experiences measured included perceived value, delight, and prevalence of deep structured experience. These subjective experiences (n = 208) were measured immediately following participation in tourist activities at 13 attractions and settings. Each tourist activity was coded according to (a) experience type, and (b) locus of activity structure. Experience type categories included activities emphasizing narratives (engagement), activities emphasizing sensory stimulation (absorption), activities requiring skill performance (immersion), and familiar activities. Locus of activity structure referred to the source of the primary determinants of the essential features of the activity and the activity environment. Locus of activity structure categories were provider-centric, activity-centric, and tourist-centric. Both tourist activity type and locus of structuring were found to elevate subjective experiences

Fast-Thinking and Slow-Thinking: A Process Approach to Understand Situated Tourist Experiences

Situated tourist experiences are encounters among tourists and experience-providers that occur at specific places and times. Such encounters are ordinarily staged by providers to optimize the probability of positive tourist experiences. Interpretive talks, dining experiences, sporting events, theatrical performances, concerts, and museum visits are examples. We propose a process-based, “Situated Tourist Experience ” (STE) framework to describe the flow of tourists ’ immediate conscious experiences during these encounters. Our framework is grounded in interdisciplinary literature on attention, immediate conscious experience, tourism experience, engagement, mindfulness, motivation, emotion, and satisfaction (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihaly

A Citation Analysis of Articles Published in the Top-Ranking Tourism Journals (2001-2010)

This paper analyses the citations received by research papers in the three top-tier tourism journals, Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Travel Research, and Tourism Management from 2001 to 2010. ANOVA tests and post-hoc tests shows that mean citation counts in both SSCI and Scopus received by research papers in the three journals were significantly different from each other. Similarly, mean numbers of tourism articles citing the same research papers were also significant for both SSCI and Scopus. Furthermore, OLS regression analysis revealed that the issue in which the article appeared, its order in the issue, and the number of pages significantly influenced total citation counts as well as citations from tourism articles received by research papers in all three journals

Experience Journey Map: A New Experience Design Tool for Structuring Youth Activities

We introduce a new experience design tool, an experience journey map, to assist youth professionals in planning engagement, immersion, and absorption activities. Experience journey maps are based on customer journey maps, which are widely used in business service design. This new approach highlights strategies for engendering deep structured experiences during the activity. An experience journey map is a matrix of columns and rows. Columns represent the sequence of activity stages. Rows are experience-structuring strategies derived from the theory of structured experience. These strategies include service performance strategies, deep structured experience strategies, and engagement, immersion, and absorption strategies. We present a case study showing how the experience journey map can be used to plan impactful youth activities

Molecular Characterization of a Debilitation-Associated Partitivirus Infecting the Pathogenic Fungus Aspergillus flavus

The opportunistic human pathogenic fungus Aspergillus flavus is known to be infected with mycoviruses. In this study, we report a novel mycovirus A. flavus partitivirus 1 (AfPV1) that was originally isolated from the abnormal colonial morphology isolate LD-3-8 of A. flavus. AfPV1 has spherical virus-like particles about 40 nm in diameter, and three double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) segments (dsRNA1, 2, and 3 with lengths of 1.7, 1.4, and 1.1 kbp, respectively) were packaged in the virions. dsRNA1, dsRNA2, and dsRNA3 each contained a single open reading frame and potentially encoded 62, 42, and 32 kDa proteins, respectively. The dsRNA1 encoded protein shows similarity to the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) of partitiviruses, and the dsRNA2 product has no significant similarity to any other capsid protein (CP) in the GenBank databases, beside some homology with the hypothetical “capsid” protein of a few partitiviruses. The dsRNA3 encodes a protein with no similarity to any protein in the GenBank database. SDS-PAGE and polypeptide mass fingerprint-mass spectrum (PMF-MS) analyses indicated that the CP of the AfPV1 was encoded by dsRNA2. Phylogenetic analysis showed that the AfPV1 and relative viruses were found in an unclassified group inside the Partitiviridae family. AfPV1 seems to result in debilitation symptoms, but had no significant effects to murine pathogenicity. These findings provide new insights into the partitiviruses taxonomy and the interactions between viruses and A. flavus

Social determinants of place attachment at a World Heritage site

While the work on place attachment is extensive, it neglects to focus on residents' and tourists' perspectives of the construct concurrently. Additionally, the role that social factors play in forging attachment to place is lacking within the tourism literature. This work focuses on whether residents' (n = 469) and tourists' (n = 461) degree of place attachment at the Osun Oshogbo Cultural Festival (Nigeria) were significantly different. Examining the psychometric properties of the place attachment scale in an international context was a second aim. The final purpose of this work was to assess whether social factors (i.e., frequency of interaction and emotional closeness) between residents and tourists could explain the resulting CFA place attachment factors. MANOVA results revealed tourists demonstrated a significantly higher degree of attachment. Each social determinant predicted the attachment factors for both samples, with the two independent variables explaining higher degrees of variance among residents