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This study attempts to examine the relationships between leisure involvement, social support, and happiness. Consequently, for data collection, this study utilizes a convenient sampling procedure, involving a questionnaire survey on scuba divers in Kenting, a southern resort town in Taiwan. In this study, 320 samples of useful samples were collected. Structural equation modeling is deployed to test the underlying relationships among the research variables. Concerning the leisure involvement of the scuba diving participants, social support is viewed as an essential antecedent. This study confirms leisure involvement is a mediator between social support and happiness in the case of scuba diving. This study further confirms that the mediation effect of leisure involvement positively affects happiness. Furthermore, social support positively leads to leisure engagement (e.g., scuba diving) and could also directly influence happiness with a positive relationship. Consequently, this study renders managerial implications for the service providers of scuba diving.

The tourist experience has matured in its body of literature, but researchers still debate the best way to measure and define the concept. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and compare memorable and on-site tourist experiences from theoretical, empirical, and methodological perspectives. A review of the literature is used to identify and describe the next evolutionary research step which is the quality-of-life (QOL) aspect of tourism experiences. It is argued that the evolving focus on QOL attributes is fueled by the theories and concepts of service-dominant logic. The paper argues that value (co)created on all sides of the equation (e.g., customer or company) must be considered when carrying out research. The paper also finds that different value outcomes for the individual customer occur in both on-site and memorable experience contexts. The findings contest an earlier theoretical argument, suggesting that memorable tourist experiences provide more value than on-site tourist experience.

This study adopted the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) because of its sophisticated imaging techniques in eliciting mental models. Scholars across disciplines have been exploring paradigms beyond positivism due to the question about the adequacy of quantitative measures to capture complete accounts and to deal with vital problems. The marketing literature also advocates the need of a new methodology to examine consumers’ underlying thought and behavior that might help alleviate the industry's inability to translate research findings directly into practices. This study elicited tourists’ mental models, which were depicted on an integrated consensus map with three metaphoric themes. Marketers might translate these metaphoric themes directly into practices. The results of this study strongly support the use of qualitative methodology, more specifically the ZMET, as a means for obtaining the underlying tourists’ behavior that often remain far beyond the reach of traditional research methods.

The ability to analyze social action as it unfolds on micro time scales – particularly the 24-hour day – is central to understanding group processes. This chapter describes a new approach to this undertaking, which treats individuals’ involvement in specific activities at specific times as bases for: (1) sequential linkages between activities; as well as (2) connections to others who engage in similar action sequences. This makes it possible to examine the emergence and internal functioning of groups using existing network analysis techniques.

We illustrate this approach with a specific application – a quantitative and visual comparison of the daily activity patterns of employed and unemployed people. We use data from 13,310 24-hour time diaries from the 2010–2013 American Time Use Surveys.

Employed and unemployed people engage in significantly different types of activities and at different times. Beyond this, network analyses reveal that unemployed individuals experience much lower levels of synchrony with each other than do employed individuals and have much less organized action sequences. In short, there is a chronic lack of prevailing norms regarding how unemployed people organize the 24-hour day.

Future research that uses time-stamped data can employ network methods to analyze and visualize how group members sequence and synchronize social action. These methods make it possible to study how the structure of social action shapes group and individual-level outcomes.

One of the most well-known, seminal models in the tourism marketing field is the one proposed more than 40 years ago by Stanley Plog. His venturesomeness model has been widely cited in journal articles, textbooks, and has also been used as a reference for planning and designing tourism marketing projects. However, empirical research on Plog’s psychographic model has yielded varied, inconclusive results, and the postulates of his conceptual framework are still subject to academic scrutiny. While some empirical investigations have corroborated the model, others have found partial or no support for it. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to offer an exhaustive review of 26 studies in the literature which have employed Plog´s venturesomeness concept to examine travellers’ personality traits, attitudes, and behaviour, as a way to synthetise empirical findings and draw conclusions from the cumulative results. A discussion of the model’s contribution to the current body of knowledge and managerial implications for tourism marketing practitioners are presented.

Although the gazing qualities of the natural environment play an essential role in the communication of tourist experiences, the natural environment is an under-communicated and underused element in the staging of tourist activities. To illustrate the potential staging strategies for tourism firms as they relate to natural environments, this paper presents a discussion of two cases from northern Norway: a dog-sled race and a Northern Lights hunt. Interpretative data analysis of the respective cases’ staging strategies was undertaken to shed light on how each case opted to stage the natural environment. Viewed as separate from the exploration of the cases, the paper includes a discussion of the staging dimensions of exploration, play, and learning. Furthermore, the benefits linked to the use of these dimensions were brought to the fore as important to efforts at involving tourists in the offered activities and in facilitating cocreation.

The purpose of this investigation was to identify the association between Experience Use History (EUH) and types of substitution choices of hikers with the perspectives of activity involvement and place attachment. On-site surveys were distributed by systematic sampling technique to obtain a representative sample of hikers with 51% response rate. The theoretical expectation was confirmed by these data. Findings indicated that among four EUH classifications, Veterans and Visitors who perceived higher levels of activity involvement and relatively lower levels of place attachment tended to make resource substitutability, while Locals who scored highest on place attachment chose to make temporal substitutability and Beginners who scored lower on both activity involvement and place attachment were apt to make both resource and activity substitutability. Suggestions and managerial implication are further discussed.

Travels and vacations organised by a large number of people to certain destinations in certain periods cause some negative impacts on the destinations in question. The concept of overtourism, which has become a current issue especially with the anti-tourism demonstrations in certain destinations such as Venice, Barcelona and Dubrovnik as a result of the increasing tourism carrying capacity, has been drawing attention in recent years regarding the sustainability in the destinations. Popular destinations that are affected by overtourism try to develop some strategies in order to minimise the negative impacts of overtourism. One of these strategies is the demarketing strategy that is developed by the destination stakeholders towards the target group. In this chapter of the book, the significance of the concept of demarketing in terms of struggle against overtourism was revealed and how demarketing strategies applied to the marketing mix and different strategies were approached in tourism studies was discussed in detail by addressing the current literature. In addition, suggestions were proposed to the popular destinations that feel the negative impacts of overtourism and will be affected by overtourism also in the future concerning creating their own demarketing strategies and destination planning.

Using the Chiayi International Band Festival (CIBF) as an example, this study attempts to examine the relationships between visitor involvement, visitor satisfaction, place attachment, and visitor loyalty. A survey was carried out from December 25, 2010, to January 3, 2011, and was able to obtain 400 valid responses. The study initially theorizes, based on literature review, that satisfaction contributes greatly to place attachment and loyalty, and visitor involvement is just an antecedent of satisfaction. However, the result indicates that visitor involvement is in fact a strong contributing factor of visitor loyalty. Furthermore, the study proposes that the casual relationship between visitor involvement and visitor satisfaction is indirect. The originally proposed model is then revised accordingly.