Over the past five years, Asia has led the world in the wellness tourism sector in terms of number of trips and revenue gains (Global Wellness Institute, 2018). Apparently, no research has examined Gen Y's intentions regarding outbound wellness tourism in Thailand.
LITERATURE REVIEW
- Customer Satisfaction
- Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM)
- Perceive Risk
- Perceived Benefit
- Health consciousness
- Perceived Expertise
- Intention to Use
- Hypothesis
Munoz-Leiva, Climent-Climent, and Liebana-Cabanillas (2016) confirmed that perceived risk has a negative effect on intention to use. In Ohanian's (1991) study, celebrities' perceived expertise about the product has some relationship with intention to purchase it.
METHODOLOGY
- Population
- Method
- Sampling
- Data Collection
- Data Analysis
The questionnaire was distributed to the respondent via an online channel, using Google Survey as a platform. Because the data was collected online, there was no specific demographic area or time of day to collect the data. To obtain the two sets of data from the people who traveled abroad and those who did not, a screening question was used in the questionnaire.
The study used demographic analysis to analyze the background of the population, including gender, age group, educational background, income, and some personal characteristics related to travel behavior. The t-test is used to find the difference in the population by finding the mean between male and female groups. In addition, to find variance, this research used ANOVA to identify differences between groups based on age range, income range, and educational background.
Moreover, the regression analysis is also used to measure how strong or how weak the relationship is between the variable to indicate the positive or negative value.
RESEARCH FINDING & ANALYSIS
Demographic Analysis
T-Test analysis
- Electronic Word of Mouth
Electronic word-of-mouth has a positive effect on the desire or intention to travel. Electronic messages have a greater influence on the intention to travel for well-being among women than among men. Women often gather information from other travel reviews to help them decide on the right destination to visit and the right service to use, which is different from men.
The female is also more confident to use the service once they have collected the information about the reviews from the other travelers. This represents the difference between males and females, which shows more influence on females than males. Furthermore, electronic word-of-mouth has a more positive influence on the desire or intention to travel on women than on men.
Test (Group Statistic)
- Health consciousness Table 4.3: T-test (Health consciousness)
- Regression
- Anova
- Age Range Comparison Table 4.13: ANOVA (Between age group)
- Educational Background Comparison
- Income Group Comparison
- Reliability Analysis
Therefore, the hypothesis H2, customer satisfaction has a positive influence on intention to use, is acceptable. In terms of relative impact on intention to use, perceived expertise has the most impact on intention to use as the beta value is .394. Perceived benefit has the second highest impact on intention to use and has a beta value of .312.
Between the educational background group, the only significance is found in electronic word of mouth as shown in the table below. For the educational background, there is a difference between the educational background groups with regard to the electronic word of mouth. Furthermore, the electronic word of mouth has a positive influence on the desire or intention to travel for these groups of people, while there is less influence for the high school group.
I usually have an intention to use the service by relying on eWOM because it helps to reduce the uncertainty involved (eWOM). The electronic word-of-mouth has a more positive impact on the desire or intention to travel to people with the income range of compared to the people who have an income of more than 60,000 baht. People who are in the income range of Baht usually have an intention to use the service by relying on eWOM because it helps to reduce the uncertainty associated with it.
Referring to the table above, all factors including customer satisfaction, eWOM, perceived risk, intention to use, perceived benefit, perceived expertise and health consciousness are reliable.
DISCUSSION
Since wellness tourism is related to health and well-being, the most important thing is the expertise of the service provider. From a previous study, consumers who are concerned about their health and well-being have a positive effect on the intention to purchase a functional food (Yen Hsu, Chen Chang, & T. Lin, 2016). Another finding of the research shows that people who care about their health have the intention to visit a doctor (Mesanovic, Emir, Selma Kadic-Maglajlic and Munjai, 2017).
Likewise, this research also found that in the wellness tourism industry, those consumers who are concerned about their health and well-being have more intentions to use the wellness tourism because it helps improve their health. However, this study does not support the previous study on the relationship between perceived risk and intention to use. If consumers are confident about the brand, trust positively influences intention (Howard and Sheth, 1969).
Some of the consumers may trust the information they find from the comments of other tourists. Therefore, this may be the reason why perceived risk is related to intention to use in this study.
CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION
For electronic word-of-mouth, the hypothesis stated that positive electronic word-of-mouth has a positive impact on intention to use. The assumption might be that eWOM does not have a significant impact on the individual who has not traveled abroad. Therefore, eWOM is not an important factor for them and does not influence their intention.
Comparing the differences between men and women, there are only two variables that are significant between men and women; the electronic word of mouth and health awareness. For the age group, there is a difference between perceived risk, perceived expertise and health awareness. They also believe that receiving wellness services such as spa treatment or mineral water in the country is no different from other countries, while people whose age is below 25 years and 25-35 years trust more wellness service providers in other countries than in their home country. .
For the income, people in the income range of Baht are most influenced by the electronic word of mouth, compared to other income ranges. Nevertheless, each variable is further identified to understand the respondents in terms of gender, age, income and educational background, in order to develop the marketing strategy for the wellness service provider outside of Thailand, and also for the tour agency or tour operator to design the program that meet the consumer's wants and needs.
The recommendation
This research achieved the objective of identifying the factors that influence the intention to use outbound wellness tourism. Therefore, perceived benefit is the next factor that has a positive impact on intention to use. So it is recommended to market towards women using electronic word of mouth as a tool to influence their intention to use the service.
Even though people who are in the age group of 35-45 years old are health conscious, they believe that it is better to receive the service in their own country than to receive the service from other countries. Therefore, outbound wellness tourism may not be the choice for people in this age group. However, people under 25 and 25-35 years old believed that the service of other countries is better than their own countries.
When considering the income as one of the factors for the target market, it is recommended to focus on the people whose income is more than Baht, as this group is influenced by the electronic word of mouth. This group also does not consider the language as an obstacle and they tend to visit the unknown destination that they have never visited before.
Limitation of the study
Moreover, even though it makes sense that the respondents are both male and female, the number of respondents who are female (61.5%) is higher than male (38.5%). This can be considered as the limit between two groups and can have some impact on the comparison. Since this is an online survey, the number of male and female population cannot be screened or divided into equal halves because it depends on who was willing to take the survey.
Also, since it is not face to face, it is not possible to know how the respondents intended to answer all the questions. The hypothesis implied that perceived risk has a negative effect on intention to use, however, the number turned out to be positive. Finally, from the regression analysis, eWOM is not significant (.828) which means that there is no impact on intention to use.
From this we can conclude that not all survey respondents traveled abroad and not all want to travel abroad for wellness tourism. As a result of the regression analysis, perceived risk and eWOM are considered as one of the limitations of this study.
A study of the relationship between health information use and health orientation in Korean mothers: focusing on the type of health information. Analysis of the healthy lifestyle consumer. 1991), ‘‘Effects of Price, Brand and Store Information on Buyers' Product Evaluations’’, Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. Talk about the network: A complex system looks at the underlying word-of-mouth process.
Retrieved from https://assets.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/th/pdf/2018/03/th-medical-tourism-industry-focus-secured.pdf. Wellness tourism: Market analysis of a special health tourism segment and implications for the hotel industry. Determinants of intention to use mobile banking apps: An extension of the classic TAM model.
The health consciousness myth: Implications of near independence of important health behaviors in the North American population. Health consciousness, scientific orientation and well-being: an investigation into the determinants of well-being attitudes and behaviors.
