“Can Advertising Message Persuade Tourists to Visit a Sabotaged Destination?”: The Mediating Effect of Regulatory Focus on Perceived Risks in Tourism

  • 許 詠雯

Student thesis: Master's Thesis

Abstract

It is important to understand how tourists perceive risks and how these risks influence their decision to travel to a sabotaged destination This study will investigate how tourists process information by understanding their travel motivations as part of their risk reduction strategies to overcome their perceived risks in traveling This study includes two research objectives The first research objective involves an empirical investigation of the dimensions of perceived risks and motivations in tourism Dimensions of risk were identified as uncontrollable risk infrastructure risk and direct service risk Tourists’ perceive uncontrollable risk to be more salient than infrastructure and direct service risks when making travel decision Dimensions of travel motivation were identified as related to adventure culture relaxation and business Tourists are highly motivated to travel for adventure than for culture relaxation and business The second research objective is an experimental study to investigate the mediating effect of regulatory focus on perceived risk information processing This involves a 2 (regulatory focus) x 2 (risk probability) x 2 (risk impact) between-subject experimental study Promotion-framed ad is preferred than prevention-framed ad under low risk condition However both promotion-framed and prevention-framed ads can be effectively communicated to tourists under high risk condition Moreover only risk events with higher recurrence probability are more consistent with prevention focus construal Risk impact of risk events does not show to be salient to tourists’ information processing when making travel decisions This study concludes that ad message that emphasizes hedonic features a promotion-framed message is sufficient to attract tourists to revisit a sabotaged destination Ad message that provides means to avoid risky events a prevention-framed message plays only a supplemental role in tourism communication persuasion because tourists’ motivation to travel is fundamentally adventure focused which is a promotion-dominated goal regulation mechanism
Date of Award2014 Aug 20
Original languageEnglish
SupervisorJu-Faye Kao (Supervisor)

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