Redai dili (Jun 2022)
The Influence of Lifestyle on Tourists' Travel Photo Sharing Behavior: A Case Study of the Xi'an Tang Paradise
Abstract
In the era of life aesthetics, tourism and life are intertwined, and tourists' needs and behaviors are changing from a hasty landscape gaze to diversified lifestyles. Lifestyle is an overall preference that shapes the individual's life patterns and behavior habits. Tourism activities are characterized by a strong emotional consumption. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is used for empirical analysis. Based on the appraisal theories of emotion, the study discusses the influence mechanism of lifestyle on tourist travel photo sharing behavior in the Xi'an Tang Paradise through emotional intermediary variables. The results show the following. First, lifestyle has no significant positive impact on tourists' travel photo sharing behavior. It can be the product of objective environmental conditions or the choice of individual subjective consciousness. However, there are contradictions and differences between subjective and objective influencing factors. Moreover, tourists' capital-owned attribute and their own dispositional tendency are not always consistent. Lifestyle has an important indirect impact on tourists' travel photo sharing behavior under the mediating effect of the sense of travel ritual and self-identity. Second, lifestyle has a significant positive impact on tourists' sense of tourism ritual, authenticity perception, and self-identity. This conclusion confirms that tourism activities are essentially an emotion-led process, which is convenient for understanding the emotional consumption characteristics of tourism activities in the context of consumption upgrading. Third, the sense of travel ritual and self-identity have a significant positive impact on tourists' travel photo sharing behavior, and play a mediating role between their lifestyle and travel photo sharing behavior. This study verifies the conclusion that ritual sense, as a positive emotion, can prompt people to share positive experiences, and provides a strong argument for tourists' ritual sense that affecting tourists' sharing behavior from a micro perspective. Furthermore, this study also echoes the scholars' arguments that lifestyle is a way of self-expression and declaration, and confirms the conclusion that self-identity can promote tourists' photo sharing behavior. Fourth, authenticity perception has no significant positive effect on tourists' travel photo sharing behavior, and does not play a mediating role between their lifestyle and travel photo sharing behavior. There are three reasons for this. First, the commercialization trend of the tourism resources of Tang Paradise is gradually serious, and the authenticity of the object on which the cultural landscape depends is gradually weakening. Second, the application of modern technology and excessive "stageization" make the rituals and activities of the Tang Paradise deviate from the cultural authenticity, weakening tourists' perception of authenticity. Finally, there are few immersive interactive experience projects in the Tang Paradise, which are difficult to trigger tourists to achieve the psychological state of the "real self." The study clarifies the mediating role of three emotional variables, namely: sense of tourism ritual, perception of authenticity, and sense of self-identity in the relationship between life style and tourists' travel photo sharing behavior. This enriches the research connotation of lifestyle in theory, infiltrates the study of lifestyle from a consumer sociology into the field of tourist behavior, and simultaneously expands the research on the antecedent variables of travel photo sharing behavior. Additionally, under the background of the strong intervention of information technology, the tourists' own characteristics, emotional psychology, and social sharing are studied in the same model, expanding the research content of positive psychology and communication, and rationally considers the influence of positive psychology on social media communication. Finally, in practice, it has certain enlightening significance for enriching tourists' experience, optimizing emotional marketing, and promoting the transformation and upgrade of tourism service quality in the Tang Paradise.
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