KJC Korea
Journal Central

Ethnic towns, geographic areas with a high ethnic concentration, serve as tourist attractions because they include unique landscapes, ethnic food, and interesting products. At the same time, a variety of scholarly attention to ethnic townshas been paid because ethnic towns are excellent places where hybridization of multiple cultures is routinely observed. Therefore, employing the concept of tourism representation, the current study examined Incheon Chinatown, the biggest ethnic town of South Korea. From the perspective of phenomenology, 18 merchants who owned shops or worked in Incheon Chinatown were interviewed with a focus on how Chinese cultural identity was being represented by the merchants to attract tourists. The results are as follows. First, the merchants tended to use objective evidence that showed the close relationship between their products and China. Second, to intentionally construct an exotic environment, the merchants tended to emphasize cultural differences through their tourism representation of Chinese cultural identity. Third, the merchants’ tourism representation of Chinese cultural identity tended to reflect the uniqueness and contemporary reality of Incheon Chinatown, not the real China. Based on the results, theoretical, practical, and policy implications are provided.

This study was to explore the templestay experience from the hermeneutic phenomenological perspective invented by van Manen (1990). Also, four fundamental lifeworld themes (or existentials) were used as heuristic guides for reflecting on the experience of templestays: lived body, lived space, lived human relation, and lived time. From the four heuristic guides, four central themes were developed and a total of fifteen sub-themes emerged to fully explicate the tourist experience from the interviews and participant observation. Next, the templestay participants’ perception of authenticity was discussed. The study suggested a Templestay Authentic Experience Design Wheel model to understand experience and authenticity. This study applied the naturalistic inquiry method, which has been neglected in the field of tourism, through hermeneutic phenomenological gaze to find meaningful and essential phenomena of the templestay experience.

As concerns for health increase, health-seeking tourists’ activities are increasing globally. In Korea, health-seeking activities based on nature have also increased significantly. To grasp this social phenomenon, therefore, this study delves into tourists’ healing psychology through empirical analysis focusing on tourists’ mindfulness, healing restorative environment, and the impacts on quality of life for participants in a nature-based healing program. This study found that healing tourists visiting “Forest Healing” ultimately improved their quality of life through their participation in the healing program. In detail, the higher the level of mindfulness, the greater the influence on nature emotional control, the healing restorative environment perception, and the greater the influence on attention restoration through healing restorative environment perception. Additionally, healing restorative environment perception and attention restoration influence on program satisfaction, and program satisfaction increased tourists’ quality of life. However, nature emotional control did not directly influence program satisfaction, but it indirectly influenced it through healing restorative environment perception. The results prove healing restorative environment is a very significant part in finding out the relations among tourists’ mindfulness, healing restorative environment, and the impacts on quality of life.

This research explores consumer response against tourism corporate irresponsibility. Through empirical surveys with adult consumers, this study demonstrates how consumers' negative moral emotional responses to corporate infractions instigate, in combination with other-regarding virtues, protest behavior toward the corporation. The collected data were analyzed with SPSS 18.0 program to examine the route model fit and confirmatory factor analysis. The mediation, moderation effect and the moderated mediation effect analysis were verified with PROCESS Macro program. At each stage the significance test was carried out by using bootstrapping method. The results of this study are as follows. First, the mediation effect of contempt was significant in the pathway from corporate social transgression to protest behaviors. Second, contempt on protest behaviors was moderated by other-regarding virtues. Third, the moderated mediation effect of contempt by other-regarding virtues was significant between corporate social transgression and protest behaviors. The results provide scholars and managers with the means of understanding consumers' reactions to tourism corporate irresponsibility.

This research was conducted to determine the influence of service quality on customer satisfaction and customer behavior intention at homestays and pensions in Damyang County using mystery shoppers. A survey was conducted with tourists who had stayed at a homestay or a pension to accomplish the purpose. Field surveys were conducted for one month from August 1, 2017. This study collected 104 questionnaires from a famous homestay and pension in the Damyang area, which has been recognized recently as a Meta-Provence tourism product. This study used the SPSS 21.0 statistical package program to perform reliability analysis, validity testing, and multiple regression analysis of the measurement items. According to the analysis, service quality factors had a positive effect on customer behavior intention and customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction also had a positive effect on customer behavior intention. This suggests that service quality and customer satisfaction are very important factors for the CEOs who run homestays and pensions. The research is meaningful in that it was conducted using mystery shoppers, who had not been studied before. In addition, it is valuable as basic research data for improvement of service quality of homestays and pensions, which has been lacking. This study can be used as important basic data for the study of not only the Damyang area but also the whole country in the future.

Despite the opinion that the tax purpose goal is not clear, the deemed input tax is very beneficial to the reduction of restaurant taxes. In other words, the majority of beneficiaries of this taxation system are restaurant businesses (96.5%). Therefore, this study was planned to grasp the awareness of the deemed input tax for restaurant business operators. First, as a result of investigating food ingredient cost factors, the food cost was 20~40%, and the ratio of exempted agricultural products to general taxability was high. Also, general taxpayers used a lot of exempted agricultural products. Second, it was found that foodservice operators were difficult to receive tax exemption, due to the refusal of issuance by the supplier and the transaction with the street vendor. Especially, the higher transactions where a tax bill could not be issued, the more difficult tax reduction was. Lastly, understanding of the exemption system for deemed input tax showed that the higher the experience of restaurants, the higher the understanding. This could be understood as a way of overcoming the management situation through the tax reduction and exemption from the viewpoint of the restaurants where the management situation was difficult.

This study analyzed the influence of language constraint on travel intention of outbound solo travelers. Travel motivation, travel constraints, and personal disposition, as well as language constraint, were specified as explanatory variables, and behavioral intention of outbound solo travelers was the dependent variable. Interaction effects between language constraint and other travel constraints were also analyzed. Empirical results show that the higher the language constraint, the lower the intention to travel alone in the future. Moreover, the results show an interaction effect of intrapersonal constraint with language constraint, indicating that when travelers with intrapersonal constraint also feel language constraint, their intentions decreased even more. It implies that there still exists a difficulty in communication for outbound solo travelers, despite the recently lowered language barrier through technological advances such as the internet, SNS, and translation applications.

The purpose of this study was to examine the antecedents of relationship marketing and their successful consequences between online social commerce and hotels by applying commitment-trust theory. The results showed that relationship value sharing, online relationship benefits, marketing communication, flexibility of online decision making, and online compatibility, which are the antecedent factors of commitment and trust in hotel and online social commerce marketing, had a positive effect on commitment. Marketing communication and online compatibility had a positive effect on trust. Trust was not significant for commitment. Commitment had a positive effect on relationship satisfaction, financial performance, and intention of long-term relationship, but, trust only had a positive effect on financial performance. Trust and commitment were found to associate with a partial mediating effect between the antecedents and the consequences. In some cases, the relationship between the antecedents and the consequences were fully mediated. The partial mediating effect of trust and commitment can be considered as a more positive effect on the performance of the hotel and online social commerce relationship when the antecedents are transmitted to the consequences through trust and commitment.

Community-based rural tourism is characterized by the interdependent nature of local residents using cultural and natural resources and human networks to create economic benefits for the region. It is important to understand collective efficacy in community-based rural tourism that performs interdependent tasks with the belief of group members that group competence is capable of performing specific tasks in common. This study conducted a case study with an exploratory study on the formation of collective efficacy in community-based rural tourism. The study site of the case was selected as Sumi village in Yangpyeong-gun, Gyeonggi-do, and the research was conducted using semi-structured interviews and internal reports of the community organization. Data were analyzed to understand collective efficacy among residents who operate rural tourism. Results showed that collective efficacy was formed in three dimensions: conflict resolution and decision making, resource utilization and redistribution, and technology and information acquisition. Also, collective efficacy was formed step by step at each dimension.

This study aimed to investigate the relationships among gamification dynamics with tourists’ fun, flow, and their memorable experiences. Data were obtained from tourists who had visited Songdo Beach. Participants were asked to go through a series of gamified scenarios first and respond to a self-administered questionnaire. A total of 351 responses were analyzed with SPSS 25.0 and AMOS 25.0. Major findings were, first, three dimensions of game dynamics (i.e., competition/achievement, rewards/relatedness, challenge) had significant impacts on tourists’ fun. Second, two dimensions of game dynamics (i.e., competition/achievement, rewards/relatedness) had significant impacts on tourists’ flow. Third, fun had a significant impact on tourists’ flow. Fourth, tourists’ fun, flow, and the competition/achievement dimension of game dynamics had significant impacts on tourists’ memorable tourism experiences, Theoretical and practical implications of the results and study limitations are discussed along with future research suggestions.