Motivations and Loyalty of the Demand for Adventure Tourism as Sustainable Travel

Abstract

Adventure tourism as a form of sustainable tourism is a potential source of social, economic, and environmental development, and the more the tourism industry is exploited in a responsible manner, the greater the development of a country. The present research proposes the following objectives: (i) to identify the motivational dimensions of demand in an adventure destination, and (ii) to determine the motivational dimensions of demand that predict the return, recommendation, and saying positive things of the adventure destination as loyalty variables. The study was carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic in Guayaquil, and the participants had visited the province of Santa Elena in Ecuador, an adventure tourism destination. This quantitative study used a sample of 318 valid questionnaires that were collected online and analyzed using factor analysis and the multiple regression enter method. The results show five motivational dimensions in adventure tourism: learning, social, biosecurity, relaxation, and competence mastery. The relaxation dimension is the most important and most influential predictor in return, recommendation, and saying positive things about the demand for adventure tourism. The results will contribute as management guides for DMOs and as sources of information for companies involved in the marketing and development of post-pandemic products. The study is also a contribution to the academic literature on adventure destinations.

Loyalty in the time of COVID-19: A review of the literature in tourism destination settings

“…The operationalization of destination loyalty typically included scale items referring to recommendation or positive word-of-mouth (WOM) about the destinations, combined with other revisit intentions items within the same loyalty construct. However, some investigations specified and operationalized tourists’ recommendations or endorsements as additional, separate constructs in their models (e.g., Chebli et al, 2021 ; Kralikova et al, 2021 ; Koç et al, 2022 ; Suhartanto et al, 2022 ; Carvache-Franco et al, 2022a , b ).…”

“…As indicated in Table 1 , the majority of the articles reported that their survey participants were domestic tourists, which is not surprising due to travel restrictions and border closures during 2020. Indeed, most studies that used samples of international tourist respondents collected their survey data later in 2021 (e.g., Otero-Gomez and Giraldo-Perez, 2022 ; Šerić and Mikulić, 2022 ; Carvache-Franco et al, 2022a , b ). Of the reviewed studies, 7 utilized co-variance based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM), while 11 employed partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), in line with the growing popularity of PLS-SEM in tourism marketing research ( Hair et al, 2021 ).…”

“…Similarly, the research by Cambra-Fierro et al (2022) concluded that destination loyalty is explained by perceived quality (β = 0.660), which in turn is predicted by the destination’s image (β = 0.543) and perceived health safety (β = 0.194) producing indirect (mediation) effects. Other constructs specifically operationalized for the pandemic context identified in the review were the degree of consistency of integrated marketing communications (IMC) as a safe destination (β = 0.408) examined by Šerić and Mikulić (2022) , and the biosecurity (β = 0.185) and relaxation (β = 0.404) motivations used in the model by Carvache-Franco et al (2022a) .…”