Tourist Mental Health Drives Destination Choice, Marketing, and Matching

Abstract

Leisure tourism, including destination choice, can be viewed as an investment in mental health maintenance. Destination marketing measures can thus be analyzed as mental health investment prospectuses, aiming to match tourist desires. A mental health framework is particularly relevant for parks and nature tourism destinations, since the benefits of nature for mental health are strongly established. We test it for one globally iconic destination, using a large-scale qualitative approach, both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tourists’ perceptions and choices contain strong mental health and well-being components, derived largely from autonomous information sources, and differing depending on origins. Parks agencies emphasize factual cognitive aspects, but tourism enterprises and destination marketing organizations use affective approaches appealing to tourists’ mental health.

Can the Development of Religious and Cultural Tourism Build a Sustainable and Friendly Life and Leisure Environment for the Elderly and Promote Physical and Mental Health?

“…Although the development of science and technology and the improvement of the economic level will not change people's goal of improving the quality of life and soul, the elderly's participation in leisure and tourism activities can improve physical and mental health [16][17][18][19]. For the elderly, improving the quality of life and the environment and enhancing positive feelings of the soul are two of the key factors to maintaining the satisfaction of the elderly with the quality of life and the environment [20][21][22]. People will lose a lot of role-playing and functions in society due to aging [15].…”

Digital Destination Matching: Practices, Priorities and Predictions

“…A central premise of the destination-matching framework [1,2] is that tourists now use search engines and social media to identify destinations, enterprises and products to plan their purchases; therefore, tourism destinations and enterprises necessarily use the same search engines and social media platforms to pitch propositions directly to individual purchasers. In this section, that premise is subject to empirical test, through interviews with individual travel agents.…”

“…In this section, that premise is subject to empirical test, through interviews with individual travel agents. The agents concerned are based in Chile, where destination choice, marketing and matching have been analyzed recently [2]. They included female and male agents from large, small, old and new agencies, with websites in Chile, Spain and USA.…”

“…The analysis of destination matching, as the interaction between destination marketing and destination choice [1,2], can potentially provide new insights into tourism research, including aspects related to sustainability. Here, we offer a set of five short commentaries on current practices, future predictions, and research priorities.…”

African Tourism in Uncertain Times: Covid-19 Research Progress

“…Nair and Sinha (2020: 307) pinpoint that travel behaviours and specific changes in decision-making are "not new concepts in the tourism industry and have been especially important over the past two decades, as the industry has witnessed a range of catastrophes from natural disasters to terrorist attacks". Yet the COVID-19 is distinctive for the truly global nature of the crisis as the pandemic effectively has halted the operations of the tourism sector in an unparalleled fashion as well as reshaping patterns of consumer travel demand and of supply chains (Buckley, 2020;Hall et al, 2020;Nair and Sinha, 2020;Cooper and Buckley, 2021;Nhamo et al, 2020;Gössling et al, 2021;Matiza and Slabbert, 2021;Pham et al, 2021;Rogerson and Rogerson, 2021a;Sharma et al, 2021;Tellioglu, 2021).…”