Halpenny, Elizabeth A.

Yan, Nanxi

English

ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst TTRA Canada 2019 Conference TTRA Canada Summer 6-14-2019 Agritourism and visitor loyalty: The role of experience, memories, positive emotion, perceived authenticity Nanxi Yan University of Alberta, nyan@ualberta.ca Elizabeth A. Halpenny University of Alberta Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation, elizabeth.halpenny@ualberta.ca Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/ttracanada_2019_conference  Part of the Tourism and Travel Commons Yan, Nanxi and Halpenny, Elizabeth A., "Agritourism and visitor loyalty: The role of experience, memories, positive emotion, perceived authenticity" (2019). TTRA Canada 2019 Conference. 8. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/ttracanada_2019_conference/8 This Refereed academic paper for presentation is brought to you for free and open access by the TTRA Canada at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in TTRA Canada 2019 Conference by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact scholarworks@library.umass.edu. 1  Title: Agritourism and visitor loyalty: The role of experience, memories, positive emotion, perceived authenticity.  Introduction Agritourism, which features activities offered on farms to attract visitors (e.g., culinary activities, corn mazes, recreational harvesting, Barbieri & Mshenga, 2008), is an important segment of the rural tourism sector. Not only can it attract visitors to rural destinations, but it can also promote employment, income, and sustainable development for rural communities (Govindasamy & Kelley, 2014; Hall, Mitchell, & Roberts, 2003). Thus, understanding what attributes can increase agritourism success through visitors’ loyalty (i.e. revisit, repurchase, and positive word of mouth) is imperative.   Customer loyalty, which is characterized as repeat business and positive word of mouth (Oliver, 1999; Prayag & Ryan, 2011), is an essential driving force for a sustained tourism and growth (Sun, Chi, & Xu, 2013). Past research has suggested a number of factors that can influence visitors’ loyalty including travel motivation, satisfaction, destination image, and place attachment (Chi & Qu, 2008; Gursoy, Chen, & Chi, 2014; Yoon & Uysal, 2005). However, to increase repeat visitation or positive recommendation, merely meeting expectations or providing satisfying experiences may not be enough. It is essential that a business can foster engaging or memorable experience for customers (Kim, Ham, Moon, Chua, & Han, 2019; Tung & Ritchie, 2011). Therefore, the purpose of this research is to understand the dimensions conducive to memorable agritourism experiences and how such experiences can impact agritourists’ loyalty.  Due to the experiential nature of agritourism experiences, Pine and Gilmore's (1998) theoretical framework; the experience economy, was adopted to examine agritourists’ visiting experiences. According to Pine and Gilmore, a memorable experience is composed of four components: education, escapism, entertainment, and esthetics. Past research also suggest that a memorable experience could increase visitors’ perceived authenticity of a place (Cohen, 1988; Gilmore & Pine, 2007), be accompanied with strong positive emotions (Loureiro, 2014; Oh, Fiore, & Jeoung, 2007), and enhance visitors’ memories of a destination (Kahneman, 2015; Pine & Gilmore, 1999). In the meantime, increased perceived authenticity (Bryce, Curran, O’Gorman, & Taheri, 2015), positive emotions (Dean & Yu, 2001), and memories (Quadri-Felitti & Fiore, 2013) have the potential to positively increase agritourists’ loyalty.   Given no previous research has simultaneously examined the structural relationships between experience economy dimensions, perceived authenticity, positive emotions, memories, and loyalty intentions in an agritourism setting, this research aims to address this research gap. We also propose two moderators (i.e., travel distance, past experience of buying local food) that may influence the relationship between perceived authenticity, positive emotions, memories, and loyalty intention. Therefore, in view of these forgoing discussions, we proposed a theoretical model below (Figure 1).  Research Method Study site. We collected data from people who participated in Alberta Open Farm Days on August 17-18th, 2018. The event provides visitors with backstage farm experiences such as farm tours and opportunities to engage in a variety of culinary activities e.g., beer and gin tastings. 2  Open Farm Days provides visitors with various engaging experiential activities which allow people to see, hear, taste, and learn; this event provides an excellent context to explore the impact of the experience offerings on visitor loyalty.  Research instrument. The survey instruments used in our research, such as experience economy measurement, perceived authenticity, positive emotions, memories, and loyalty’s proxies (i.e., revisit intention, recommend intention, and repurchase intention) were adopted from reading extant literature (Cohen, 1988; Loureiro, 2014; Oh et al., 2007; Prayag & Ryan, 2011; Wang, 1999). All items were measured with a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “strongly disagree=1” to “strongly agree=5.”   Data collection and analysis. During the 2-day event, research assistants were sent to 7 event sites to intercept farm visitors and collect contact information from those who agreed to participate in the research. Two days after the end of the event, we distributed online surveys (Google forms) to participants via email. In total, we collected 250 valid responses. SPSS 22.0 was employed to calculate descriptive statistics and reliability scores. SmartPLS 3.0 was used to analyze the path relationships (Ringle, Wende, & Becker, 2015). We followed Hair and associates’ (2017) and Ali and colleagues' (2018) guidelines to clean and analyze data.   Results and Conclusion Visitors’ profile. Table 1 shows the visitors’ profile (n=250). The majority of respondents are female (70% of the sample), most of them are (54%) are aged between 25 and 44. Over 50 of the participants received post-secondary education (79.6%). A large amount of sample (78.4%) were first time visitors.   Research findings. Item reliability (Cronbach’s alpha > 0.7), average variance extracted (AVE, >0.5) were assessed to examine measurement adequacy. The proposed model constructs showed validity and reliability for further analysis (see Table 2). A bootstrapping with 1000 iterations was performed to examine the statistical significance. Our results show that the four dimensions of agritourism experiences (i.e., education, esthetics, escapism, and entertainment) together, substantially explained visitors’ memories (R2=.800), perceived authenticity (R2=.871), and positive emotions (R2=.872). Also, memories, perceived authenticity, and positive emotions explained agritourists’ intention to revisit (R2=.497) and intention to purchase (R2=.552) moderately, but also predicted intention to recommend (R2=.753) strongly. See complete results of the structural model and hypotheses testing in Table 3. Meanwhile, our moderating analyses showed no moderating relationships were significant (i.e. the influence of distance travelled and awareness of Alberta agriculture on loyalty).   Our results suggest that the four dimensions of experience can positively influence agritourists’ positive emotions, memories, and perceived authenticity. These three aforementioned variables can predict customers’ loyalty intention; positive emotions can predict recommendation intention whereas perceived authenticity can influence purchase intention. In particular, producing positive memories was the only variable that predicted all three loyalty intentions, which reinforces the importance of producing memorable experiences for customers. These results provide practitioners with important information on how to design agritourism experiences to increase visitors’ intention to return, to recommend, and to purchase products from them.  3  Work Cited Ali, F., Rasoolimanesh, S. M., Sarstedt, M., Ringle, C. M., & Ryu, K. (2018). An assessment of the use of partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) in hospitality research. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 30(1), 514–538. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-10-2016-0568 Barbieri, C., & Mshenga, P. M. (2008). The Role of the Firm and Owner Characteristics on the Performance of Agritourism Farms. Sociologia Ruralis, 48(2), 166–183. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9523.2008.00450.x Bryce, D., Curran, R., O’Gorman, K., & Taheri, B. (2015). Visitors’ engagement and authenticity: Japanese heritage consumption. Tourism Management, 46, 571–581. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2014.08.012 Chi, C. G.-Q., & Qu, H. (2008). Examining the structural relationships of destination image, tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty: An integrated approach. Tourism Management, 29(4), 624–636. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2007.06.007 Cohen, E. (1988). Authenticity and commoditization in tourism. Annals of Tourism Research, 15(3), 371–386. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-7383(88)90028-X Dean, A., & Yu, Y. (2001). The contribution of emotional satisfaction to consumer loyalty. International Journal of Service Industry Management, 12(3), 234–250. https://doi.org/10.1108/09564230110393239 Gilmore, J. H., & Pine, B. J. (2007). Authenticity : what consumers really want. Govindasamy, R., & Kelley, K. (2014). Agritourism consumers’ participation in wine tasting events: An econometric analysis. International Journal of Wine Business Research, 26(2), 120–138. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWBR-04-2013-0011 Gursoy, D., Chen, J. S., & Chi, C. G. (2014). Theoretical examination of destination loyalty formation. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-12-2013-0539 Hair, J. F., Hult, T., Ringle, C., & Sarstedt, M. (2017). A primer on partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Thousand Oaks (Calif.): SAGE Publications, Inc. Hall, D., Mitchell, M., & Roberts, L. (2003). Tourism and the countryside: dynamic relationships. In D. Hall, L. Roberts, & M. Mitchell (Eds.), New Directions in Rural Tourism (pp. 3–15). Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. Kahneman, D. (2015). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Staus and Giroux. Kim, S., Ham, S., Moon, H., Chua, B.-L., & Han, H. (2019). Experience, brand prestige, perceived value (functional, hedonic, social, and financial), and loyalty among GROCERANT customers. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 77, 169–177. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2018.06.026 Loureiro, S. M. C. (2014). The role of the rural tourism experience economy in place attachment and behavioral intentions. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 40, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2014.02.010 Oh, H., Fiore, A. M., & Jeoung, M. (2007). Measuring experience economy concepts: Tourism applications. Journal of Travel Research, 46(2), 119–132. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047287507304039 Oliver, R. L. (1999). Whence Consumer Loyalty? Journal of Marketing, 63(4_suppl1), 33–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429990634s105 Pine, B. J., & Gilmore, J. H. (1998). Welcome to the experience economy. Harvard Business Review, 97–107. 4  Pine, B. J. I., & Gilmore, H. J. (1999). Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. (H. B. S. Press, Ed.), Harvard Business School Press Books. Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1080/02642069700000028 Prayag, G., & Ryan, C. (2011). Antecedents of Tourists’ Loyalty to Mauritius: The Role and Influence of Destination Image, Place Attachment, Personal Involvement, and Satisfaction. Journal of Travel Research, 51(3), 342–356. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047287511410321 Quadri-Felitti, D. L., & Fiore, A. M. (2013). Destination loyalty: Effects of wine tourists’ experiences, memories, and satisfaction on intentions. Tourism and Hospitality Research, 13(1), 47–62. https://doi.org/10.1177/1467358413510017 Ringle, C. M., Wende, S., & Becker, J. M. (2015). SmartPLS 3. Bönningstedt: SmartPLS. https://doi.org/http://www.smartpls.com Sun, X., Geng-Qing Chi, C., & Xu, H. (2013). Developing destination loyalty: The case of hainan island. Annals of Tourism Research, 43(1), 547–577. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2013.04.006 Tung, V. W. S., & Ritchie, J. R. B. (2011). Exploring the essence of memorable tourism experiences. Annals of Tourism Research, 38(4), 1367–1386. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2011.03.009 Wang, N. (1999). Rethinking authenticity in tourism experience. Annals of Tourism Research, 26(2), 349–370. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/S0160-7383(98)00103-0 Yoon, Y., & Uysal, M. (2005). An examination of the effects of motivation and satisfaction on destination loyalty: a structural model. Tourism Management, 26(1), 45–56. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2003.08.016   5  Appendix  Figure 1 Theoretical model     6  Table 1 Agritourists’ profiles (n=250)  Frequency N % Age 18-24 years old 21 8.4% 25-34 years old 66 26.4% 35-44 years old 69 27.6% 45-54 years old 28 11.2% 55-64 years old 40 16.0% 65-74 years old 23 9.2% 75 years or older 2 0.8% Under 18 1 0.4% Gender Female 175 70.0% Male 75 30.0% Years in Canada 1-3 years 4 1.6% 10 or more years 224 89.6% 3-9 years 20 8.0% I do not live in Canada 1 0.4% less than 1 year 1 0.4% Education Level Community college/technical school diploma 51 20.4% Graduate degree 74 29.6% High school diploma 21 8.4% Less than high school 1 0.4% Some post-secondary 29 11.6% Undergraduate university degree 74 29.6% Household Income $100,000 or higher 77 30.8% $50,000 – $74,999 41 16.4% $75,000 - $99,999 39 15.6% I choose not to answer this question 64 25.6% Under $50 000 29 11.6% First Time or Repeat Visitors First time visitors 196 78.4%  Repeat Visitors 54 21.6%   7  Table 2 Measurements of this study’s constructs Latent constructs and measures Mean (SD) Std. Deviation Item loadings Cronbach’s alpha AVE Education 3.87 1.10  .944 .808 I learnt a lot 3.76 1.13 .889   It stimulated my curiosity to learn new things 3.82 1.07 .876   It was an authentic learning experience 4.03 1.08 .920   The experience made me more knowledgeable 3.88 1.20 .910   Esthetics 4.22 0.76  .919 .692 Being at the Open Farms Days site was very pleasant 4.51 .77 .905   The setting was very attractive 4.34 .78 .759   The setting provided pleasure to my senses 4.14 .93 .758   I felt a sense of harmony 3.93 1.06 .828   The surroundings strengthened my overall experience 4.19 .88 .898   Escapism 3.10 1.00  .852 .593 I escaped from reality 3.28 1.19 .672   I felt like I was in a different time or place 3.07 1.17 .826   I totally forgot about my daily routine 3.35 1.15 .740   The experience let be imagine being someone else 2.72 1.27 .832   Entertainment 3.59 0.93  .891 .671 I really enjoyed watching what others were doing 3.60 1.20 .760   Activities were fun to watch 3.77 1.03 .815   Watching others perform was captivating 3.24 1.05 .812   The activities the hosts and visitors engaged in were very entertaining 3.76 1.03 .885   Perceived authenticity 3.54 .92  .841 .644 8  Was personally transformative 2.94 1.100 .699   Was highly immersive and absorbing 3.59 1.063 .820   Was authentic and real 4.08 1.026 .878   Positive emotions 3.94 0.88  .904 .703 Was very stimulating 3.69 1.083 .851   Was very exciting 3.66 1.000 .836   Was very interesting 4.10 1.001 .835   Was very enjoyable 4.29 .897 .831   Pleasant memories 4.11 0.90  .930 .768 Produced many positive memories of the rural destination 4.07 1.002 .875   Produced many positive impressions of local agricultural producers 4.16 .984 .891   Produced many positive impressions of the Open Farm Days venue 4.16 .962 .871   Provided wonderful memories of rural Alberta 4.05 .989 .868   Awareness of Alberta Agriculture      I had high levels of awareness and knowledge of Alberta agriculture prior to attending Open Farm Days in 2018 3.22 1.148 .163   Travel Distance      Calculated using vendors and participants’ postal codes 106.215 17.360    Note. 1=Strongly disagree, 5=Strongly agree   9  Table 3: Tests of the relationships   Path Coefficients t-value Education -> Memories .142** 2.820 Education -> Perceived authenticity_ .338*** 5.283 Education -> Positive emotions .114** 3.024 Entertainment -> Memories .184** 3.171 Entertainment -> Perceived authenticity_ .282*** 3.584 Entertainment -> Positive emotions .390*** 6.761 Escapism -> Memories .135** 3.362 Escapism -> Perceived authenticity_ .234*** 4.780 Escapism -> Positive emotions .042* 2.121 Esthetics -> Memories .551*** 8.495 Esthetics -> Perceived authenticity_ .246*** 4.351 Esthetics -> Positive emotions .492*** 8.830 Memories -> Intention to recommend .877*** 5.247 Memories -> Intention to purchase .405* 2.542 Memories -> Intention to revisit .523* 2.134 Positive emotions -> Intention to recommend .028** 2.977 Perceived authenticity-> Intention to purchase .0295* 2.323 *p<.05. **p < .01. ***p < .001; X2=1,330.551, SRMR=.044.                . 

Agritourism and visitor loyalty: The role of experience, memories, positive emotion, perceived authenticity

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Agritourism and visitor loyalty: The role of experience, memories, positive emotion, perceived authenticity

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