Tourists for hire: International working holidaymakers in a work based destination in regional Australia

Differentiating Asian working holiday makers from traditional backpackers on the basis of accommodation preferences

“…Because WHMs normally stay in Australia for an extended period and make multiple trips during their stays, the respondents were asked to select any options that applied when making trips in Australia. A set of questions that measured English language proficiency was also included in the questionnaire because previous studies noted Asian WHMs' limited language skills as a potential barrier to utilising certain types of accommodation (Jarvis & Peel, 2013;Maksay, 2007;Peng & Hebbani, 2014). The language barrier was also commonly reported during the first phase as a major concern when choosing accommodation.…”

“…Researchers (e.g. Jarvis & Peel, 2013;Pearce et al, 2009;Slaughter, 2004) noted that a relatively small proportion of Asian travellers was identified when they collected data from backpacker accommodation, and Jarvis and Peel (2013) noted that language and cultural barriers may have prevented Asian travellers from utilising backpacker accommodation.…”

“…This may be because there has been a focus on Western youths travelling to Asia and Australasia in the tourism literature (Ateljevic & Doorne, 2004), while studies on young Asian independent travellers have only been actively conducted in recent years (Bui et al, 2013a;Paris, Musa, & Thirumoorthi, 2014;Pearce, 2007;Yang, Khoo-Lattimore, & Arcodia, 2017;Zhang, Tucker, Morrison, & Wu, 2017). Jarvis and Peel (2013) highlighted the need for further research to understand the young Asian independent travellers, especially the growing Asian WHMs in Australia, to extend the current understanding of the youth travel market and to explore the unique characteristics of this market.…”

“…However, the sampling frames for these studies focussed mainly on travellers who were staying at backpacker accommodation and individuals with working holiday visas were categorised as part of the larger backpacker segment. Asian WHMs make major financial commitments when they pay for accommodation during their stays in the country, and their economic contributions to the tourism industry are immense (Tan, Richardson, Lester, Bai, & Sun, 2009); however, as Jarvis and Peel (2013) noted, a comprehensive understanding of their travel behaviours, including their accommodation preferences and reasons for their choices, is still lacking. Since young Asian travellers are culturally distant from young European travellers, anecdotal observations have suggested that Asian WHMs may also have different characteristics from European WHMs (Hall, 1976;Hofstede, 2001;Reisinger, 2009).…”

Coherence of Work Based Learning and Regional Development in Latvia

“…Case studies have been presented on various innovative approaches as well, in attempt to address the issue of youth employment. For example, an innovative approach of travel (holidaymaking) with work-base destination has been presented and analyzed -emphasizing the benefits for both, the working travelers and the local (regional) economies [23]. It is suggested by authors that for sustainable regional development knowledge sharing is to be seen as an action of great potential both at individual and group level, including the development of social network platforms -in order to arrive jointly to innovative solutions by integrating a diversity of perspectives [27] including the development of vocational education networks.…”