People's demand for and interest in the tourism of UNESCO World Heritage Sites continues to rise around the globe. Many nations around the world are pushing forward registrations in UNESCO World Heritage Sites, various policies, and active investment ...
People's demand for and interest in the tourism of UNESCO World Heritage Sites continues to rise around the globe. Many nations around the world are pushing forward registrations in UNESCO World Heritage Sites, various policies, and active investment plans based on a judgment that UNESCO tourism has great potential for future growth as a tourism industry. South Korea is no exception, making efforts to invest lots of interest and money to develop its tourism industry based on its UNESCO World Heritage Sites. As the people show more and more interest in the tourism of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the central government is making active policies and building tourist infrastructure along with the local governments of areas containing a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is time to promote a broad understanding of tourists visiting UNESCO World Heritage Sites and conduct in-depth researches on the behavioral intentions of tourists and their elements. It is needed to take interest in the values of UNESCO World Heritage Sites as tourist destinations in which tourists can experience, see, and feel the various cultures and histories of humankind as their only values are no longer predicated on their preservation and protection. This study thus set out to expand and apply the concepts of three variables including the four experiential elements of tourism, placeness, and flow according to the theory of planned behavior with a group of tourists that visited the Hantan River of Gyeonggi Province, which has been designated as a UNESCO Global Geopark in July, 2020. The study also aimed to examine structural relations among the major factors of a decision-making process among tourists visiting a UNESCO site. In an effort to measure the behavioral intention of tourists at the Hantan River Global Geopark, total five professional investigators including the author of the present study distributed total 565 questionnaires to tourists that visited the Hantan River on October 10~November 8, 2020 and secured 487 valid samples. The collected samples were put through the direct data coding process and treated with the SPSS 21.0 and AMOS 21.0 program for statistical analysis and treatment. Frequency analysis was conducted to examine the demographic characteristics of the respondents, being followed by exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to test the measurement items in validity and internal consistency. AMOS 21.0 was used to check causal relations among the constructs and the fitness of a model. Path coefficients were also analyzed to test hypotheses proposed by the research model. The major findings were as follows: the study examined the effects, if any, of four experiential elements including entertainment, esthetic, educational and escapist experiences, on the attitudes of tourists and found that escapist and educational experiences had positive(+) effects on their attitudes. The study also examined the effects of the three variables of the theory of planned behavior including attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control on the parameters including place attachment, place dependence, and flow and found that only perceived behavioral control had positive(+) effects on tourists' behavior intention via the paths of place attachment and flow. Attitude and subjective norm had no significant impacts on their behavioral intention via the parameter paths. In addition, the study examined paths to see whether attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control could have direct impacts on behavioral intention and found that none of them had significant impacts on it. Based on these findings, the present study will be able to serve as a previous study for follow-up studies on the prediction of tourists' behavior at UNESCO World Heritage Sites and their psychological variables that can affect their tourist decision-making process, as well as support their theoretical frameworks unlike many of previous studies that investigated policies of managing and preserving UNESCO World Heritage Sites from the viewpoint of suppliers. The study also makes an academic contribution by expanding and applying additional variables including experiences, placeness, and flow according to the theory of planned behavior to examine the tourist decision-making process of visitors to UNESCO World Heritage Sites more systematically and increase the explanatory power of its research. The study has following practical implications: the Hantan River Global Geopark imposes few behavioral restrictions and can use all of its resources including natural, cultural, and historical ones as well as geological ones as tourist resources. The study thus proposes that it should take a bold action by discarding the general tourism structure for cultural heritage sites and attract active investments in infrastructure projects at the local government level. The study also raises a need for policies and programs to adjust tourists' perceived behavioral control abilities by minimizing their time loss on a sightseeing tour to UNESCO World Heritage Sites. It is also needed to introduce escapist and educational elements such as thematic experiences, camping, museums, and exhibition halls within the site so that they can have active impacts on the formation of tourists' attitudes. Other proposals include a project of supporting SNS and community vitalization efforts and a program of offering benefits for such efforts so that tourists can motivate themselves to do sightseeing and find meanings in it for themselves. The analysis results of the study may serve as objective data for the cultural heritage tourism industry while highlighting the importance of UNESCO World Heritage Sites as tourist destinations. They will also provide important policy materials to local governments tasked with projects on UNESCO World Heritage Sites and a set of guidelines for practical developmental directionality to enterprises hoping to do business related to the tourism of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The scope of research was, however, limited to tourists that visited the Hantan River Global Geopark in Gyeonggi Province, which means that its empirical analysis results have limitations with their generalization into all of tourism industries related to UNESCO. In the future, the research model will hopefully function as a practical tool to promote the growth of the tourism industry related to UNESCO, being applied to various UNESCO World Heritage Sites.