Asian Youth Travellers

Youth travel is one of the fastest growing travel markets with longer stay and therefore, higher spend. However, existing studies have mainly focused on Western youth travellers. Only a handful of studies have considered the travel experiences of Asian youths, and the findings of these studies suggest that the travel motivation, preference and behaviour of Asian youth travellers are different from Western youths. In response to the emerging youth market in Asia, this edited volume sets out to deepen existing knowledge of Asian youth travellers. This introductory chapter provides a cursory literature review of youth tourism studies to identify the research gaps and potential avenues for scholars who are interested in researching Asian youth travellers, an increasingly vital subfield of tourism studies.

This study investigates the motivations of Thai working and holiday makers (WHMs), who were granted a work and holiday visa to Australia. This study extends the Existence, Relatedness and Growth (ERG) theory by integrating the socio-psychological motivation theory of tourists over two phases of experience, namely, the prior to (anticipation) and during (on-site) travel phase. This article employs a netnographic study of Thai websites and blogs relating to WHMs as its research method, in order to determine the nature of the motivations. The results reveal a different emphasis on the nature of motivations between the prior to and during the visit phases. The existential motivation under ERG theory, particularly on the monetary aspect, plays a crucial role and is the predominant driver of Thai WHMs in both the prior to and during the visit phases. This study shows how Thai WHMs pose unique motivations that differ from those of WHMs discussed in the Western and Asian literature.

This chapter aims to understand Asian youth’s interests, motivations, and experience during short-term international field trips and thus improve upon organisational efficiency of the trip and create a better student learning experience. This comparative case study is based on insights derived from structured interviews with undergraduate students majoring in tourism-related fields and in geography at tertiary educational institutions in Macao, China, and Seoul, South Korea, who participated in field trips to South Korea and to Vietnam during the 2016–2017 academic seasons. The results reflect the students’ concerns, motivations, and learning experiences before, during, and after a trip and their perceptions about the overall organisation and quality of the trip. Students’ perceptions and experiences, revealed from this study, will help to understand Asian youth subcultures as well as shared values, which may differ from those of other youth tourists.

In this article, the youth culture of Azerbaijan people has been explored in terms of their experiences at dark sites and perceptions of those places. The particularity of this research is that it explores dark site experiences and youth perceptions of thanatological attractions in a Muslim-majority country where more than 90% of population follow Islamic laws and regulations. For this, young visitors of a genocide site have been interviewed who were identified with different cultural values and norms despite living in the same Muslim society. Depending on their cultural identity, three different experiences were revealed during the research. These experiences include spiritual, heritage and learning with a stimulating impact on making social changes. The key findings of this research work indicate that the variety of dark site experiences depends on the culture and values held by young people. Limitations are discussed, and suggestions are made on expanding the research in different dark suppliers and exploring visitor experiences that have personal attachment to the dark site.

‘Donkey friends’ (驴友 lü you) have been increasingly popular – Chinese backpackers who look for travel companions online and form a small travel group for overseas journeys. To investigate various cultural influences of this group orientation, mobile ethnography as the research method combining multisited ethnography and netnography was adopted to follow Chinese outbound backpackers’ behaviour corporally and virtually to create a ‘thick description’. Data were collected through three Chinese backpackers’ journeys in Europe between June and November 2014 by participant observations and in-depth interviews. The finding suggests that besides budget sensitiveness and loneliness avoidance, Chinese collectivistic culture and high-risk sensitivity are main motives for small group travel. Both Chinese Communist Party’s policies and traditional values influence the trend of looking for travel companions online. In addition, the finding argues that weighing the paradoxical risk concerns that Chinese backpackers tend to take against the risk of travelling with strangers they met on backpacker forums alleviates to avoid the risk of cultural uncertainty. Three findings of this study from various dimensions reflect hybrid cultural influences of current Chinese society onto younger generations’ daily practices. By investigating cultural influences of Chinese backpackers’ group orientation, this study contributes to the understanding of Chinese current hybrid culture as well as its influence on tourist behaviour. It also contributes to backpacker literature responding to the ‘paradigm shift’ of the mobilities beyond the Eurocentric perspective. Furthermore, this paper explores the popular phenomena of Chinese backpackers’ group orientations in Europe.

Chinese Post-1980s tourists are increasingly engaging in adventure tourism activities in their outbound travel. As strangers in foreign lands, this chapter explores their safety concerns and coping strategies in undertaking long-distance trekking by employing a netnography approach. By closely identifying a series of safety concerns that Chinese Post-1980s encountered, it establishes a holistic framework outlining a range of successful coping strategies. In particular, it highlights the process that Chinese Post-1980s develop their coping strategies. This study calls for a synergy between tourists, tourism service providers and destination organizations so as to enhance safe and enjoyable adventure tourism experiences among Chinese Post-1980s tourists.

Educational tourism has been adopted by many Japanese schools as part of their curriculum or as extracurricular learning programmes for many years. Although the number of school-aged children in Japan has been decreasing as the country’s overall population has grown older, the number of schools, especially high schools, engaging in overseas school trips has increased in the past two decades. Educational tourism is an important segment of Japan’s domestic tourism in particular, and it also has a large economic impact on global tourism. However, although educational tourism in Western countries has been previously discussed in the English tourism literature, educational tourism in Japan, especially overseas school trips, has received limited attention. Thus, this type of travel is not well represented in the growing body of literature on educational tourism. In order to fill this gap, this chapter first discusses the concept of educational tourism and provides an overview of educational tourism programmes in Japanese schools. The chapter then explores current trends and unique features of these programmes by consulting available secondary data. Finally, challenges related to educational tourism in Japan are discussed to gain a better understanding of this unique segment of the international tourism market.

Self-driving travel has been a popular choice for Chinese tourists for more than a decade, and with the rapid expansion of outbound travel, many Chinese tourists now participate in self-driving tours overseas. Differing from its Western counterpart, the Chinese self-driving market is nevertheless underresearched. This chapter presents the characteristics of young Chinese outbound travellers and their motivations and experiences in undertaking self-driving tours. Using in-depth interviews and focus groups, this study targeted Chinese outbound travellers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to explore the motivations and experiences of self-driving tourists. A qualitative content analysis was conducted, and the results show that most of the self-driving tourists are sophisticated travellers who are interested in unique landscapes and local lifestyles, among other tourist activities. Young Chinese self-drive travellers have shown motivations and behaviours that differ from those of the older generation of Chinese tourists and their Western counterparts. The findings have implications for destination marketers and tour operators who are serving the growing Chinese tourist market.

Along with worldwide trends in tourism, cultural and creative industries have become both public and private sectors’ concerns. Accordingly, there are many cultural and creative areas and creative parks built in many different countries, including Taiwan. This chapter utilizes the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to analyze the link between destination image and its perceived value to predict tourist future intentions to visit cultural and creative parks. The research was conducted in three cultural and creative parks located in Taipei (Huashan 1914 Creative Park), Taichung (Taichung Cultural Creative Park), and Kaohsiung (The Pier-2 Art Center). Structured questionnaires were conveniently and purposively distributed to the visitors, and 434 useable questionnaires were collected and analyzed using structural analysis. The results show that the proposed extended TPB model was partially supported except for the effect of attitude on behavior intentions. In particular, perceived behavioral control plays an important role in predicting Asian youth visitors’ behavior intentions compared to the perceived value, which can be attributed to the collective cultural value. Moreover, destination image leads to higher perceived value, and that further fosters behavior intentions.