The 21st century well deserves to be called the century of "culture" as its level of interest in culture is higher than ever. As people of 21st century continually raise the standard of living financially and improve the conditions having more of spar...
The 21st century well deserves to be called the century of "culture" as its level of interest in culture is higher than ever. As people of 21st century continually raise the standard of living financially and improve the conditions having more of spare time, the level of participation in or possessing cultural life has become one of important measures to judge the quality of one's life by. This trend is now the matter of great interest of many scholars as they focus on culture's economical value and its creation. There always have been demands on High culture and desire to experience different kinds of cultures, which seem to keep increasing. The consumption of spare time or leisure is considered not only to be the rest and refreshment but also to be catalyst of an active consumption of different cultures.
Understanding this trend, many of local governments have been taking advantage of their cultural resources and created a numerous cultural tourism festivals. The more globalization and openness to other cultures deepen, the more demands for local cultural festivals grow and it eventually causes the boost in festivals’ size in return. Besides, since it is a higher value-added industry than other types of industries, local governments are making a serious effort to develop such (seasonal or periodical) festivals or events that are linked to their regional cultures. However, this competitive development of cultural tourism festivals by local governments is being questioned whether those festivals gain sufficient number of visitors and customers (in order to make a profit).
The purpose of this study is to suggest a proper direction for local tourism festivals and to propose it to those who organize local tourism festivals, such as government officers and so on, by analyzing and presenting the relation among visitors’ perceived value, satisfaction level, revisit rate and recommendation intention based on data collected from the actual visitors of festivals.
First of all, I inquired into precedent studies and theories for the prescription of an object of study in terms of its concept and characteristics. As a result, I came to a conclusion that local tourism festivals initially begun as certain regions traditional events that strongly had provincialism, and that adopted the characteristics of a festival in progress. With time, they turned into the region’s important event which offered every kind of things, which could disclose the identification of the region in various forms, which were special dishes, drinks, plays, and etc.
For these local cultural tourism festivals to put down roots successfully, visitors to these festivals must feel a certain level of satisfaction. In this study, the perceived value of visitors is used as an index to measure it. This term was originally generated from and used in the field of business administration, especially marketing. When this term is applied to this study on local cultural tourism festivals, the perceived value is the comparison between the sum amounts of costs that consist of expenses spent in order to arrive at the actual place of a festival(service) and to participate in a festival(to receive services offered), and the quality of those services in return.
Among many preceding studies on the perceived value, a respectful number of them, which are more related to this study, are selected to develop evaluation bases for an empirical study and the term, ‘perceived value’ is classified into 5 different values as follows; acquisition value, monetary value, emotional value, social value, and transactional value.
Based on correlation analysis of these classified values, there is found to be a great deal of relativity among them. From this, it was necessary to find out about the possible inverse relation between variables that were applied to this study. Therefore, I compared relations among visitors’ perceived value, satisfaction level, revisit rate and recommendation intention so as to examine a hypothesis of this study and the following is the summary.
First, monetary value, social value and transactional value are the only ones that have a casual relation with satisfaction level among 5 values mentioned above. From the fact that two of these three values in a casual relation with satisfaction level received from a local cultural tourism festival are monetary value and transactional value, it can easily be assumed that people are much concerned with financial factor.
In other words, a majority of festival visitors move a fairly far distance to get to the place of a festival and they look for services with good enough quality to feel compensated for their spending on transportation. Since their spending is not limited to transportation but extends to participation fare, meals, and even accommodation, it is inevitable. The reason social value show a casual relation with level of satisfaction can be sought in people’s natural tendency to enjoy this kind of festivals or events with their families and/or friends.
Hence, local governments hosting such local cultural tourism festivals must deliberate how to improve the quality of a festival itself along with the way to raise the standard of food, transportation, parking space, accommodation and so on. They also need to develop entertaining programs that can be shared by all sorts of visitors.
Secondly, it is proven to be true that there is a definite casual relation among visitors’ perceived value, satisfaction level, revisit rate, and recommendation intention.
This is not a result from a separate correlation analysis between the perceived value and satisfaction level, satisfaction level and revisit intention, or level of satisfaction and recommendation intention. It is a result of a structural and overall analysis of all the variables shown above.
In brief, the satisfaction level of visitors is determined by their perceived value formed while and/or after experiencing a local cultural tourism festival and if it reaches or exceeds a certain level, it is more likely for them to revisit and to recommend to others. The local governments should fully comprehend it and make every effort to make their festivals that people want to talk about and to revisit.