Year: 2019
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The tourism sector is becoming an essential part of the world economy with more than 3 million tourists crossing international borders each day.The motives driving this behavior are, however, only rudimentarily understood in the social sciences, and few have approached the issue experimentally.Furthermore, the emergence of social media use in this context is rampant but barely included in travel motivation research.The main aim of the present work is to explore if signaling, the act of displaying your experiences to others in order to achieve social esteem, should be included as a travel motive.Two experiments were conducted to explore this possibility, a field-experiment among domestic and international tourists visiting Bergen, and a student-sample experiment.The first investigated if different degrees of signaling opportunities impacted intentions to visit a tourist attraction in Bergen, while the second investigated whether the loss of signaling opportunities from destinations with different levels of attractiveness impacted scores of disappointment and misfortune.Results were ambiguous, indicating no increase in intention to visit the tourist attraction in the first experiment, while the second experiment exhibited higher scores of disappointment and misfortune when losing signaling opportunities from more prestigious destinations.The present work discusses reasons for these findings, but maintains that the role of signaling as a travel motive remains unclear.
Author: Sebastian Bjørkheim
Language: English
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2994944862