No abstract

Ancestry has received limited attention within the tourism literature but is shown to play a crucial role in heritage tourism, especially for countries with extended diasporas such as Ireland, Italy India, China, and Scotland. The purpose of this study is to explore ancestral tourist motivations, and attain a broader understanding of this market. A survey of 282 ancestral tourists allowed the identification of three key factors: ancestral tourist motivation; heritage tourist motivations; and mass tourist motivation. These themes enabled a detailed analysis of clusters, identifying four ancestral segments: full heritage immersion; the ancestral enthusiast; general interest; and heritage focused. Given the lack of funding and resources currently available to ancestral tourism providers, the identification of these factors goes some way to highlighting productive areas of focus for promotional efforts and resources.

Ancestral tourism in Scotland, a sector of the heritage tourism market sensitive to consumer personalisation, has particular propensities towards process-driven co-created experiences. These experiences occur within existing categories of object-based and existential notions of authenticity alongside an emergent category of the ‘authentically imagined past’. The latter of these modes reveals a complex interplay between professionally endorsed validation of the empirical veracity of objects, documents and places and the deeply held, authentically imagined, narratives of ‘home’. These narratives, built up in the Diaspora over centuries, drive new processes towards authenticity in tourism. We conducted 31 re-enactment interviews across 27 sites throughout Scotland with curators, archivists, and volunteers to explore these notions of authenticity within the ancestral tourism context

To address the potential ambivalent effects of customer value creation behavior (CVCB) in a service setting, we developed a theoretical model identifying separate psychological mechanisms that account for both positive and negative effects of CVCB on customer outcomes, such as customer value and customer well-being. Participants comprised 103 business customer–supplier dyads. The results show that CVCB enhanced customer outcomes through the intermediate mechanism of customer self-determination, but hindered customer outcomes by generating customer role stress. In addition, the results indicate that relationship quality moderates the effect of CVCB on customer self-determination and role stress, thus channeling its effect in either a positive or a negative direction. The results offer insight into the mixed findings on customer behavior in the service literature.

The proposition underpinning this study is that engaging in meaningful dialogue with previous visitors represents an efficient and effective use of resources for a destination marketing organization (DMO), compared to above-the-line advertising in broadcast media. However, there has been a lack of attention in the tourism literature relating to destination switching, loyalty, and customer relationship management (CRM) to test such a proposition. This article reports an investigation of visitor relationship marketing orientation among DMOs. A model of CRM orientation, which was developed from the wider marketing literature and a prior qualitative study, was used to develop a scale to operationalize DMO-visitor relationship orientation. Owing to a small sample, the partial least squares method of structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data. Although the sample limits the ability to generalize, the results indicate that the DMOs' visitor orientation is generally responsive and reactive rather than proactive.