An Examination of the Relationship between Rural Tourists’ Satisfaction, Revisitation and Information Preferences: A Korean Case Study

Sustainability 2014, 6(9), 6293-6311; doi:10.3390/su6096293

Author 

Hee-Sun Cho ^1,* , Byungseol Byun ²

 and Sunmi Shin ³

¹

Global Cooperation Division, Green Technology Center, Seoul 100-705, Korea

²

Department of Public Administration, Inha University, Incheon 402-751, Korea

³

Department of Urban Planning, Inha University, Incheon 402-751, Korea

^*

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. 

Received: 24 June 2014 / Revised: 18 August 2014 / Accepted: 29 August 2014 / Published: 12 September 2014

(This article belongs to the Section Sustainable Urban and Rural Development)

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Abstract 

To encourage the sustainability of rural tourism and to achieve success in the tourist industry, an understanding of the factors by which tourists are motivated to visit rural areas is required. This study aims to measure factors affecting rural tourists’ satisfaction in relation to different aspects of a destination and to increase the likelihood of revisitation and recommendation. This study also attempts to examine differences in relation to satisfaction depending on the information source preference. Overall satisfaction was influenced by physical infrastructure, service quality and satisfaction level with tour programs. However, the quality of services was more related to tourists’ intentions to revisit and recommend, suggesting that its qualitative improvement can contribute to vitalizing stagnant domestic tourism. The findings revealed that tourists’ satisfaction was high when people mainly gained tourist information through formal government sources, word-of-mouth and Internet advertising, suggesting that the positive correlation between tourists’ satisfaction and information sources reflects the reliability and credibility of those sources. View Full-Text

Keywords: sustainable rural tourism;  tourist satisfaction;  service quality;  revisitation;  recommendation;  information preference

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0).

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