| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立宜蘭大學 === 應用經濟與管理學系應用經濟學碩士班 === 102 === The development of agri-tourism has created significant important effect on the entire tourism industry. In 2013, the number of tourists visited Yilan County for agri-tourism reached 6.61 millions (about 23.72% of the country) which is the most visited area in the country. According to the 80/20 marketing rule, 80% of total revenue is generated by the 20% re-buyers, therefore, it is critical to raise the customers’ loyalty to the sustainable development of an industry. By understanding the factors that cause the travel loyalty of the tourists, limited resources can be used to their best and effective developing strategies.
The loyalty classification in this study referred to Oliver’s (1997) loyalty which includes behavior loyalty and attitude loyalty. The customers’ loyalty was measured, according to Jones and Sasser (1995), by the frequencies of visiting as attitude loyalty and by the willingness to recommend to their relatives and friends and their own revisiting in the future as attitude loyalty.
The factors that affect the travel loyalty of agri-tourism were first studied. Interviewing questionnaires were carried in July and August, 2013. Interviewees were sampled according to the ratio of tourist’s number of an individual agri-tourism site to the year-round tourist’s number recorded in the “The final report of 2012 Yilan County leisure agricultural economic valuation”. The business items of each interviewing site in the following study were also referred to the report. This study analyzed questionnaires of 908 self-trip tourists by Travel Cost Method (TCM), and adopted on-site Poisson model to correct the endogenous stratification and truncation problem of on-site sample to build the travel demand function. In addition to the factors of travel cost, soci-economic variables, single or multiple destination trips adopted by Hwang and Chen (2011), the message resource of tourism and business items of agri-tourism sites were also included in the model. The concept of unconstrained model and constrained model in the chi-square different test were applied to construct optimal travel demand function and to reveal the factors that affect the behavior loyalty, which is represented by the frequency of visits.
Results from behavior loyalty study reveal that model explaining power was significantly increased by adopting the message resource and business items of the agri-tourism sites into the travel demand function, which indicates that tourist’s message resources and business items of leisure agricultural sites should not be ignored. Among message resources, “self experience” shows positive effect on behavior loyalty, and “pubic message resources” was of the opposite. Among the items of business studied, “catering” shows positive effect on behavioral loyalty while “experiencing” and “accommodation” indicate negative effects.
After the construction of the travel demand function, estimation of the total economic benefit rendered by touring (the area between the demand curve and the number of travel) which includes recreation benefits and currency benefits were made possible. Recreation benefit, one of the effective factors of attitudinal loyalty according to references, has a larger portion but is easily to be ignored.
The attitudinal loyalty was measured by the arithmetic average of willingness of tourists to recommend and to revisit the site. Path analysis was applied to understand the influences of the three variables, recreation benefit, tourists’ satisfaction and tourists’ expense, on attitude loyalty.
In order to provide better advices to agri-tourism managers, this study separates tourists’ expenses into experiencing, catering, accommodation, souvenir, traffic and the opportunity cost of traffic time. Results show that all the explainable variables of tourists have positive effects on their attitude loyalty. The sequence of variables from the largest effect to the least are satisfaction, recreation benefit, experiencing activity cost, catering cost, accommodation cost, traffic cost and the opportunity cost of traffic time, and souvenir cost.
From results above, we recommend that agri-tourism managers in Yilan Country may include catering to their business and try to attract tourists to make their first visit and to obtain good experience, to create the behavioral loyalty of the tourists. Meanwhile, increase tourists’ satisfaction on agri-tourism sites and the expenses on experiencing activities may also raise recreation benefits and attitudinal loyalty of tourists and render agri-tourism a sustainable developing industry.
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