KJC Korea
Journal Central

Social media has become a place where travelers express their emotions and record travel experiences. However, there has been little research on sharing travel experiences on social media and happiness. The purpose of this study is to understand why people share travel experiences on social media and is to propose a conceptual framework of the relationship between sharing travel experiences on social media and happiness. A systematic quantitative literature review method was applied to explore research trends in sharing travel experiences on social media. Specifically, from the SCOPUS database, a total of 120 articles were extracted followed by the PRISMA checklist. Then, they were coded with several categories, such as publication, keywords, the research contexts, and variables, and were finally exported to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and analyzed. Results of the systematic qualitative litterateur review suggest that sharing travel experiences on social media positively influences travel satisfaction and enhances travelers’ self-esteem and happiness. Theoretically, this study developed a new theoretical framework on the relationship between sharing travel experience on social media and happiness. In particular, the framework indicates that even though individuals motivation of sharing travel expediences are different, they may experiences either Hedonia or Eudaimonia by doing so. Results of this study also imply that social media could make practical functions such as advertising travel destination and monitoring current and potential travelers' behaviors.

As the world is struggling with the coronavirus (COVID-19), it is an important research task to understand the negative impact of the disease on the tourism industry with similar examples from the past and to prepare countermeasures for it. This study examines the effects of tourist attention to Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) on international tourism demand for South Korea during 2009– 2016. Search volume indices for MERS in Google and Baidu were employed as a proxy for the tourist attention paid to MERS. Using a structural vector autoregression model with block exogeneity restrictions, we set up tourist attention to MERS as an exogenous variable and control for endogeneity between macroeconomic variables and tourist arrivals. Our results show that the tourist attention paid to MERS has detrimental effects on tourist arrivals and its effects are heterogeneous across visitor countries. While the negative effects of tourist attention to MERS on U.S. and European tourist arrivals were moderate, this negative information effect was more pronounced when the countries of visitors are closer to Korea, such as Japan and China. Future research directions and limitations of the study was discussed at the end of the study.

This study explores the determinants influencing travel audience during the COVID-19 outbreak. The specific purposes of this study are as follows: 1) to verify TriRisk - a risk perception scale proposed by Ferrer et al.(2016), 2) to confirm the determinants of travel avoidance intentions along with demographic variables by deriving the concept of perceived severity and risk perception, and 3) to investigate the interaction effects of the travel frequency and the old and weak. Data were collected through an online survey from July 26, 2020 to August 7, 2020 when travel restriction measures and social distancing policy were enforced in South Korea due to COVID-19. A questionnaire was administered to those aged 20 and over, and 279 samples were included in data analysis. Using a binary logistic regression model, the authors confirmed that gender, education level, area of residence, affective risk perception, and perceived physical severity positively influenced travel avoidance intentions. Additionally, the old and weak and travel frequency exerted positive interaction effects between gender and travel avoidance intentions. This study provides academic contributions to the field by applying TriRisk perception to convey better knowledge of the decision making of travel avoidance in the pandemic era. It also offers practical implications by suggesting effective communication strategies tailored to target markets.

The purpose of this study is to explore healing tourism experiences from the perspective of leisure psychology. Using the case of templestay expedience and through text mining on the big data of templestay experience, it investigates the dimensions of healing tourism. It also explored the emotions of templestay participants with sentiment analysis. Data were collected from SNS such as facebook, twitter and Youtube, and they were used after refinement. Analyses of data suggests two dimensions of the experiences of healing tourism: (a) environmental experience, which consists of special environment or places from templestay, and (b) healing experience, which is composed of different activities of healing. Results of sentiment analysis on the emotions of the templestay participants indicates that they experienced positive emotions such as good feelings, joy and interest. In addition, results showed that templestay participants’ experience of positive emotion could make an effect on their experience of happiness. However, surprisingly, results also showed that a few templestay participants experience negative feelings such as fear, anger, anxiety, which may be experienced as a part of healing. This study will be able to contribute to healing tourism by providing researchers with useful data of participants’ experience and by suggesting practitioners with healing tourism guidelines.

Middle-aged people in their 40s and older are found to be primary visitors of healing forests in South Korea. The present study sought to identify the relationship between the awareness of successful aging of middle aged healing forests visitors and their behavioral intention of healing tourism. Using systemic sampling method, data for this study was collected from the Bongsan Healing Forest visitors in their 40s to 65, and a final sample of 312 was used for the data analysis. We found that the more the participants think daily welling is important in their successful aging, the better they are likely to have positive attitude and perceived control on healing tourism. Results also show that the research participants' awareness of importance on psychological welling in the successful aging is positively associated with their attitude and subjective norm and perceived behavior control of healing tourism. Results also indicated that the healing forest visitors' awareness of importance on the self efficacy in the successful aging is significantly impact on their subjective norms and perceived control on healing tourism. Furthermore, we found that the healing forest visitors attitude and subjective norm of healing tourism were found to be significantly related to their behavior intention of healing tourism. This study contributed to the theoretical expansion of tourism sciences by introducing the conceptual framework of successful aging that is relatively new in the field of tourism sciences and has been mostly studies in other fields such as gerontology, nursing, and physical education.

From the perspective of balanced communication in public sphere, this study analyzed the controversies among different stakeholders surrounding the revisions of 'the Special Act on Assistance to the Development of Abandoned Mine Areas' in 2011 and 2021. Using the collection tool of Textom 5.0 and analysis tool of UCINET 6.0 NetDraw, a semantic network analysis was performed to achieve the purpose of the study. Specifically, articles and news about the special act revisions, which appeared in twelve on-off line news papers in 2011 and 2021, were collected and analyzed. Results showed that the most highly mentioned keywords in the 2011 revision controversy were the justification for the casino and background for the special act, while those of the 2021 revision controversy were abolition of the statue of limitation of the special act and protest against governments. These imply that controversy surrounding revision in 2021 were more powerful and effective for the revision of the law compared to that of 2011. This study shows the importance of collecting data on the communication process among different stakeholders to develop better policy, which entails balanced communication in public sphere. Policy makers could use the results of this study for developing strategic measures for the balanced communication in tourism policy related public sphere.

Using the Technology Acceptance Model, this study explored the impact of casino staffs’ recognition of the Casino RFID chips on their job performance. In this study, the external variables of casino ICT equipment adoption is divided into three factors: system factor, environment factor and management factor. We sought to identify the impact of aforementioned three factors, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, the impact of perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use on user's job performance. Data were collected from the employers of a casino company in South Korea in 2018 and a total of 186 sample was used for the data analysis. The findings show that the RFID adoption's system factor and management factor have positive impact on both perceived usefulness and ease of use, but environment factor has no impact on the constructs. Moreover, both perceived usefulness and ease of use have positive impact on users' job performance. The results revealed that casino industry should consider new equipment' system and management factor when they are considering adopting new technologies. Results also suggest that unlike other industry, environmental factor of ICT equipment has not much things to do with staffs' job performance in the casino industry. From a practical point of view, this study could contribute to the casino industry's human resource development in relation to the introduction of ICT equipment.

As the accommodation sharing industry grows, the role of guests and hosts participating in transactions with the Airbnb platform is also increasing. However, researches about the guests’ perception of Airbnb and the impact of host interaction with guest is lacking. Using the trust-transfer theory and attachment theory, this study examined how the interaction of host with guest make impact on the intention of guest's continuous use of Airbnb. We conducted a survey with 228 guests who have used Airbnb. The hypotheses were tested using structural equation modelling. It was found that guest interaction with host had a positive effect on trust in Airbnb and trust in the host. Trust in Airbnb and trust in the host had a positive effect on Airbnb attachment and host attachment, respectively. Finally, Airbnb attachment and host attachment had a positive effect on continuance intention. Also, it was found that trust in Airbnb can be transferred to trust in the host, and host attachment was found to stimulate Airbnb attachment. This study identifies the trust and attachment formed by the interaction with guest, and the continuance intention. Theoretically, our study contributes to expand trust-transfer and attachment theory by applying the home-sharing economy. Practically, practitioners of platform businesses and accommodation sharing industry participants can refer to our empirical results.