Are they all “serendipitous”?

Abstract

McKercher's cultural tourist typology (2002) has been used widely for destinations. This research began as a replication of McKercher; the current paper reports new insights. The aims are to examine the typology at New Zealand's Bay of Islands and modify it accordingly. Our modification provides improved understanding of the Serendipitous tourist. The relatively large number of Serendipitous tourists visiting the Bay of Islands suggested that they could be broken into 2 different groups, expanding McKercher's original 5 typologies into a conventional 2‐by‐3 matrix. “Serendipitous” remains a useful label for one group, and “Ancillary” was chosen for the newly identified subtype. Differences between them are explained.

Segmentation of Foreign Tourists Based on Emotional Perception—The Case of Granada, Spain

“…Taking into account these dimensions, five groups were projected-purposeful cultural tourists, including tourists with relevant cultural practice and whose main motivation is to visit heritage destinations and learn about culture and heritage; sightseeing cultural tourists, a segment that, despite having heritage as their main motivation, they also pursue experiences focused on entertainment; casual cultural tourists, made up of those where cultural motivation plays a partial role in the choice to travel to a heritage site; incidental cultural tourists, visitors for whom culture is of little importance in the choice of a destination to visit, however, they take part in events of cultural tourism; finally, serendipitous cultural tourists, who visit cultural attractions in the destination, but cultural motivation plays a very limited or no role. The described segmentation model of cultural tourists has been applied in different studies [8,22,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32].…”

Segmentation of tourists in the heritage site of Cuenca, Ecuador

“…This same model is followed by Nguyen and Cheung (2014). On the other hand, Morita and Johnston (2018) go deep in this model dividing serendipitous cultural tourists in to different groups: serendipitous and ancillary.…”

Segmentation of Tourists That Participate in a Cultural Event: The Fiesta of the Patios in Córdoba (Spain)

“…Regarding the basis of these dimensions, McKercher proposes five segments of cultural tourists: the purposeful cultural tourist, the sightseeing cultural tourist, the casual cultural tourist, the incident cultural tourist, and the serendipitous cultural tourist. This segmentation is one of the most used models in the segmentation of cultural tourists, recently validated in the research conducted by Morita and Johnston (2018).…”