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<div>The rising inactive lifestyle highlights the need to find efficient ways to tackle this worldwide lousy habit. Conventionally, polices of resolving healthy issues such as smoking and overeating focus on providing regulations and information, drawing on the assumption that people will change behavior when they consciously realize the harms and benefits. However, policy interventions have only shown limited success. On the other side, nudging, which assumes people act subliminally and aims to steer people in the right direction without limiting their freedom of choice, is suggested as a promising approach in lessening healthy issues. However, nudging interventions have not received sufficient attention in research so far, especially with regards to walkable designs that lead people to intend to walk instead of taking motor vehicles. </div><div><br></div><div>To bridge this gap, innovatively, the present study incorporates nudging techniques into walkability design. Nudging techniques include priming, salience, and norms. Priming is a phenomenon whereby exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance. The present study primed participants with walking shoes in advance, expecting they have higher intention in walking in later experiments. Salience bias predisposes individuals to focus on items that are more prominent or emotionally striking and ignore those that are unremarkable. In order to generate salience bias, sidewalks of a street view on a black-and-white sketch were highlighted with colors. Then, the study displays the sketch with colored sidewalks to participants, expecting those with salience bias have a higher intention to walk. Norms are typical patterns of behavior, generally accompanied by the expectation that people will behave according to the pattern. The norm in this study delivered the information that most tourists are walking, expecting a participant who received the information will act consistently with the majority. </div><div><br></div><div>The research is based on a carefully designed online questionnaire with scenario-based experiments where participants imagined to be tourists. Research results reveal: 1) priming with walking shoes has significant effects on inspiring people to walk, 2) salient sidewalks nudge people to walk and warm colors like red even have more potential in encouraging walking, and 3) descriptive norms have potent effects on nudging walking, especially when added with identification information. Further, three mediators were identified to bridge the effect of salience on walking intention, namely visibility, excitement, and enjoyment. Visibility represents how noticeable the sidewalks are. Excitement indicates colored and un-colored sidewalks bring expected exciting or boring experience. Enjoyment is the degree of pleasure that participants perceived when imaging to walk on the sidewalks. Collectively, visibility, excitement, enjoyment, prime, and norms together play crucial roles in nudging people to walk. Additionally, females, exercise lovers, and hospitality and leisure industry workers tend to have higher intentions in walking while traveling. </div><div><br></div><div>Theoretically, the thesis adds new knowledge to interventions and deconstructions of tourists' walking intentions. Additionally, the study contributes to the refinement of descriptive norms and the literature of social comparison. Practically, the study implies that wellness resources need to be easily noticed by the public so as to make optimal use of healthy support. It also alarms tourism practitioners that besides improving tourists' health, wellness resources can become a pull factor of the tourist attraction and thereby bring tourism economic benefits.</div>

<p>Purpose of visit is one of the main determinants of destination choice. Assessing the fulfillment of travelers’ desires could thus gauge the tourism potential of a country from the perspective of travelers. The main reasons for traveling are relaxation, pleasure and entertainment, social interaction, opportunity to meet a romantic or sexual partner, educational opportunity, self-fulfillment, wish fulfillment, shopping, business, holiday, health, and transit. Meanwhile, academic research on satisfying the curiosity about a destination remains underdeveloped. The concept of curiosity is central to motivation and curiosity as a personality trait plays a significant role in the behavior of a traveler.</p> <p><br></p> <p>The goal of this dissertation was to examine the tourism potential of a destination from the point of view of travelers interested in exploring new horizons and perspectives to better fulfill their expectations and increase customer satisfaction. The purpose of this study is three-fold: (1) conceptualize destination curiosity; (2) develop a scale for destination curiosity; (3) examine the impact of destination curiosity as a major driver of international travel. For the latter, a set of integral relationships across different measurement items associated with destination curiosity and the cultural identity dimension of place identity is instituted in an SEM model in which the dependent variable is international visit intention. </p> <p>For this purpose, this study coined the term destination curiosity (hereafter, DC), which was defined as the travel enthusiasm that is reflective of a curious behavior to explore and seek fulfillment in acquiring knowledge through the actual travel experience at the destination. Aligned with Berlyne’s definition of curiosity and exploratory behavior, who is the most influential contributor to the concept of exploratory behavior, the two main dimensions of curiosity continue to be perceptual curiosity, which is more emotionally driven, and epistemic curiosity, which is information seeking behavior and cognitively driven.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Having addressed both the affective and cognitive drivers of curiosity to conceptualize DC, sensation seeking, novelty experience, need for cognition, and perceptual curiosity were incorporated into the approach. DC was conceptualized according to Fine's clockspeed model (1998). Fine’s model is related to the rate of change and includes two dimensions: process control (integrality-modularity) and decision control (slow-fast clockspeed). By incorporating this model, both the complexity and diversity dimensions of DC were considered. Therefore, DC was conceptualized in a way that illustrates how the existing or potential competitive advantages of destinations can influence the destination choices of travelers when they travel to explore new horizons and perspectives. In this study Fine’s clockspeed model—as a supply chain model defined to be used by suppliers/organizations—is incorporated in conceptualizing destination curiosity, as personality trait of a traveler, with the lens of demand expectation. </p> <p><br></p> <p>As for developing a scale through a rigorous approach via higher-order factor modeling, a scale was developed to measure DC. Delphi method was used to purify the initial measurement items that were adopted from the perceptual curiosity scale (Collins, Litman, & Spielberger, 2004), the need for cognition scale (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982), the desire for novelty scale (Pearson, 1970), and the sensation seeking scale (Zuckerman, Kolin, Price, & Zoob, 1964) in the travel context. In addition, EFA and higher-order factor modeling were incorporated to develop a scale. </p> <p><br></p> <p>Finally, to ensure the predictive validity of the developed scale, another study was designed to examine the mediating effect of DC on the impact of the cultural identity (dimension of brand identity) of a country on international visit intention. Motion pictures, mega-events, or gastronomy arguably act as instigators; while established brand persistence, geopolitics, or the existence of stereotypes about a destination act as inhibitors when it comes to one’s willingness to travel to another country. Therefore, Turkey was chosen for the context and a scenario was defined that addressed all the mentioned elements. The cultural identity of a destination was considered a proper antecedent for examining the mediating effect of DC on international visit, as the desire to enjoy unique pleasant experiences is likely to be universal. Meanwhile, culture is undoubtedly a unique attribute of any destination, whether a destination affiliated with thousands of years of fame or a non-major tourist destination which has sustained its culture. The significant mediating effect of DC in that study shows its importance in destination marketing.</p> <p><br></p> <p>The DC is arguably critical for the improvement of relations between nations. The more people travel to explore new horizons and perspectives, the more they will understand each other. In the same vein, for travelers with a high level of DC, traveling is a means of nourishing their soul that can eventually improve the well-being of the global society.</p>

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<p>Tourism is typically a hedonic product, and its consumption promotes positive psychology and wellbeing. Industry practitioners and academics have long been advocating sustainable practices and experiences that promote the health and wellness benefits of tourism. Indeed, studies that support designing tourism experiences with positive social and wellness outcomes are needed to better leverage design factors in delivering, communicating, and sustaining the health-related benefits of the tourism experiences. Food is an integral part of the overall tourism experience and has important implications for tourists’ pleasure and wellbeing. Thus, it is important to identify the factors that contribute to a better wellness value of the tourist food experience. </p> <p>Using a multi-qualitative method, the first study explored the communal dining experiences of solo travelers. The results indicate that solo traveler communal dining is affected by many motivations (e.g., socialization and authenticity seeking) and constraints (e.g., safety and health concerns). Other factors that were found to affect communal dining include socio-demographic factors (age, gender, cultural background, previous experiences, and extroversion); other diners’ factors (e.g., attitudes and behaviors, perceived similarity, and cultural barriers); dining place-related factors (e.g., social environment, entertainment, and employees openness); and situation-related factors (food quality, environment safety, group composition, communal dining vibes, and dining time). This study found that communal dining triggers four experiential domains: sensory, intellectual, affective, and behavioral which could result in a transformative and wellness value for solo travelers. Under the right circumstances, communal dining triggers a process of self-change that results in personal and social transformations. </p> <p>Continuing to examine the social experiences of solo travelers, the second study empirically examined the impact of the emotional display of fellow diners on solo travelers’ affect and perceived interpersonal relations during communal dining. The scenario-based experiment showed that other diners' display of emotions influenced solo traveler's affect and rapport perceptions in communal dining. Additionally, fellow communal table diners’ characteristics including their ingroup status and perceived similarity can play a role in impacting solo travelers’ communal dining experience. The perceived similarity was found to act as a trigger or “catalyst” for communal dining experience formation for solo travelers. Further, a positive influence of affect and rapport on solo travelers’ subjective wellbeing was noted.</p> <p>The third study examined the phenomenon of tourist food sharing. The study used experimental design to empirically examine the impact of food sharing on tourists’ interpersonal relationship development, sense of authenticity, and subjective wellbeing. The two experiments showed that tourist food sharing improves interpersonal relationships, tourist perceptions of experience authenticity, and wellbeing. Two culturally divergent tourist groups were compared: U.S. tourists and Chinese tourists. The results showed that U.S. tourists evaluated food sharing higher regarding its impact on authenticity and wellbeing than their Chinese counterparts. </p>