How to increase the value of rural tourism in spain, based on customer experiences
- Autores: Wookhyun An
- Directores de la Tesis: Silverio Alarcón Lorenzo (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid ( España ) en 2021
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Mercedes Sánchez García (presid.), Emilio Pindado Tapia (secret.), Margarita M. Brugarolas Mollá-Bauza (voc.), Carmen Escribá Pérez (voc.), María Ramona Barrena Figueroa (voc.)
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: Archivo Digital UPM
- Resumen
The purpose of this research is to offer a basis upon which to establish a strategic direction that can strengthen the competitive capacity to rural tourism providers and local government legislators, through deep analysis of the essence of the customer experience in order to enhance customer value in rural tourism.
To achieve this goal, different three studies were conducted. Study 1 aimed to use a non-immersive approach to understand the reality of rural tourism in Spain, assess the quality of the information that users freely post in different forums on the internet and process those opinions so that it would serve as a basis for the design of questionnaires used in future research. Next, Study 2 focused on exploring rural tourists’ views in order to identify different market segmentation in relation to rural tourism experiences. Finally, Study 3 concentrated on reviewing articles associated with sustainable rural tourism found on the Web of Science database over a 10-year span from 2009 to 2019.
The different studies incorporated into this thesis applied the optimal methods in order to reach each goal. For Study 1, the netnography methodology, which is an online participatory observation technique based on user-generated content that enables market researchers to observe natural consumer behaviors, was conducted on 1002 tourists’ opinions in three online communities. Qualitative information derived from netnography combined with quantitative tools, multiple correspondence analysis and cluster analysis, allows for the segmentation of the rural tourism market. For Study 2, visual Q, a personal subjectivity research methodology, was applied to present both visual and linguistic aspects so that tourists can more intuitively recognize and answer questions regarding their experiences. Thus, it enables researchers to explore rural tourism experiences from tourists’ subjective perceptions. For Study 3, systematic review was conducted on the 73 articles that were selected due to their inclusion of the concept of sustainable rural tourism and listed in a comprehensive table; thereby revealing the research purpose, topics, detailed topics, research methods, and data source of the articles.
According to the present study areas, three key conclusions were extracted. In Study 1, the information from online users was confirmed to be valuable, and this allows for the characterization of rural tourists and their segmentation. In Study 2, the results showed that there are three primary segments of tourist experiences in rural tourism: occasion driven visitor, active leisure seeker and rural immersion pursuer and across all visitors, a common pursuit of a pleasant break. In Study 3, the findings indicate that many papers on sustainable rural tourism were written from a holistic sustainability perspective without being biased towards any one of the environmental, economic or social aspects. In the field of rural tourism, it is essential to pay attention to interactions with all aspects of the environment, economy, and society, and to analyze them overall. In addition, this study confirmed that efforts to understand sustainable rural tourism from the customer perspective have increased, since customer loyalty is considered important for sustainability.
The present thesis is significant in that it began with the qualitative collection of a user-generated or personal subjective content and finished with the quantitative segmentation of the market. In addition, it is significant in that since it evaluated the knowledge status for the first time through systematic review and applied content analysis to academic literature related to sustainability in the sector of rural tourism, it can expand and deepen knowledge and the understanding of related topics and raise awareness of a new research direction.
