A Cross-Cultural Study of College Students' Travel Preferences

Abstract

To understand the behavior of tourists from different cultures, a cross-cultural study was conducted to examine Japanese and American college students' travel preferences. A psychographic approach based on value orientations was used to understand the relationship between travel preferences and students' cultural tendencies of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism. The study confirmed previous findings that Japanese and American college students have different cultural tendencies and travel preferences. In addition, horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism significantly correlated with several travel preferences among Japanese and American college students.

Urban destination loyalty drivers and cross-national moderator effects: The case of Barcelona

“…With respect to the tourism industry, numerous studies take as reference the country dimension to explain different aspects of tourist consumer behaviour: information search behaviour Gursoy & Umbreit, 2004), hospitality (McCleary, Choi, & Weber, 1998;Mok & Armstrong, 1998;Yuksel et al, 2006), destinations (Iverson, 1997;Kozak, 2002;Lee & Lee, 2009;Sakakida, Cole, & Card, 2004;You, O'Leary, Morrison, & Hong, 2000) and airline passengers (Kim & Prideaux, 2003). But although the presence of cultural differences and their impact has been dealt with in many aspects of human behaviour, very few studies analyse tourists' perceptions and their attitude and behaviour towards an urban destination in terms of their country of residence.…”

Students' travel behaviour: a cross‐cultural comparison of UK and China

“…This could be explained by the fact that there are few travel agents/tour operators which offer student travel products in China. In contrast in the UK, organisations such as the Student Travel Association offer a wide range of products from full package tours to fl ight-only offers and have travel agencies on university campuses to simplify travel purchasing further (Sakakida et al, 2004). This shows that in the UK, student travel is an established market which is well served by specialist travel agencies and tour operators, while in China, it is just an emerging market, which has not yet been fully exploited by the travel industry.…”

An Investigation of Travel Behavior of Chinese International Students in the UK

“…Much of this money remained with locally owned businesses and communities, thus contributing to poverty alleviation and sustainable economic development (Tjolle, 2011). A review of relevant literature revealed that international students have become important participants in the international tourism industry (Huang, 2006;Michael et al, 2003;Ryan & Zhang, 2007;Sakakida, Cole, & Card, 2004;Shoham, Schrage, & van Eeden, 2004;Son & Pearce, 2005). China has become one of the biggest contributors to international student numbers in Britain (Higher Education Statistics Agency [HESA], 2012).…”