The Influence of Tourist Inertia on WOM Communication in Educational Tourism

Abstract

Educational tourism is the integration of the education and tourism industries, which is beneficial for students to observe real-world phenomena and apply what they have learned. Therefore, it has received high attention from the education department and the academic community. However, existing studies have mostly explored the topic from the perspective of educational tourism resources and planning. Less attention has met to scenic spots and tourist behaviors in edu-tourism context. This article aims to analyze the influence path of word-of-mouth in educational tourism and to clarify the moderating role of tourist inertia. Based on this, this study obtained 426 valid questionnaires through a questionnaire survey. Moreover, this study utilized methods such as correlation analysis and regression analysis to analyze the data, clarifying the correlations of variables, causal relationships, and the moderating effect of tourist inertia. Findings show that tourist satisfaction is an important antecedent of word-of-mouth in the field of educational tourism. Moreover, the findings of this paper not only confirm the tourist-land relationship between educational tourism scenic spots and tourists, and identify their important antecedents, but also enhance the applicability of the theory of place dependence and place identity. What is more special is that this study also found that tourist inertia is both strengthen and weaken variable. In the context of educational tourism, it is a bivariate moderating variable. Finally, the research suggests that managers of educational tourism destinations should take some measures to enhance tourist satisfaction and gain higher word-of-mouth from tourists.