Recently, people with experience of traveling abroad are showing inclination of choosing flexible and independent travel, which enables people to plan their itinerary freely and make their travel unique, rather than package tour, in addition to this, ...
Recently, people with experience of traveling abroad are showing inclination of choosing flexible and independent travel, which enables people to plan their itinerary freely and make their travel unique, rather than package tour, in addition to this, the number of people choosing flexible and independent travel is in a great increase. Indeed, it was an independent travel which became an issue to travel agency industries since 2006, and this is now arousing interests of travel agencies as a new blue ocean. It has been researched as, 66% of consumers using travel agency goods are showing proclivity to trust the non-professional consumers' UCC based information rather than information given by professional travelers or travel agencies' internet sites, and besides it has been researched as those proclivity of consumers are, in fact, influencing consumptions in travel-related goods. Based on this fact, this research tries to verify whether a feature of experiential value, which is bifurcated by dimension of extrinsic/intrinsic and active/reactive, actually constructs the information sharing system between participants in community based on trust toward on-line travel community, and whether there really has been a mediated effect between those concepts. And finally, this research tries to empirically verify relation of cause and effect of intention in knowledge sharing and experiential value between community participants, which is the outcome of on-line community activity.
Users of on-line communities visit them to exchange their information, interact, to get the emotional band, and etc. Through precedent studies, this study will epitomize the theoretical concepts of features of on-line community, including value on experience.
Former studies show that the features of Internet shopping mall, which consist of the quality of Internet shopping mall service, had a positive effect on consumers' experienced value. Based on former studies which imply the positive effect of Internet shopping mall on consumers' experiential value, this study has re-applied the concept of experiential value on on-line travel community, and supposed that it will show similar inclination with that of Internet shopping mall. This study has censored the answered papers and finally selected 179 of them to be analyzed. These 179 of censored papers has been analyzed by SPSS and AMOS. Questions given were censored by criterion of reliability and validity, and SEM(Structured Equation Model) was used to verify the hypothesis.
Through procedures of hypothesis test, dissimilar to study that of Mathwick(2001), it has been concluded that experiential value of on-line travel community is showing tendency to have economic value, interest value(Intrinsic value + Entertainment value), visual appeal, escapism, in general. In addition, through process of examining experiential value and intention in knowledge, it has been examined that every experiential values are having significant influence over intention in knowledge sharing, and interest value(Intrinsic value + Entertainment value) had the most significant influence on intention in knowledge sharing. Following experiential values that had influence on intention in knowledge sharing were economic value, visual appeal and escapism, in order.
This study has a meaning in that, by applying these variables to on-line travel community circumstance, it has verified the influence of experiential value, which acts as a preceding variable, toward intention in knowledge sharing, and this means that experiential value has a power on community participants, and makes them to actively share the knowledge.
Lastly, the conclusion of this study signifies the necessity in recognizing the importance of experiential value and that managing the variety of values experienced in on-line travel communities is important.
It is considered that future research should verify the features of only-web site enrolled members' experiential value and intention in knowledge sharing. In addition, there exists a necessity to embark a research on targets of on-line hotel reservation web-site and hotel related on-line communities, besides on-line travel community.