Tourists’ motives and perceptions of destination card consumption

ABSTRACT

Considering the dearth of research investigating destination cards from the tourists’ point of view, this study seeks to complement the growing stream of research on destination cards by elucidating what motivates and inhibits tourists to purchase destination cards and how tourists perceive the importance of offerings available in destination cards. Drawing on data solicited via in-depth interviews and a questionnaire survey, cost savings and time savings were found to be the primary motives leading tourists to purchase destination cards. In contrast, lack of knowledge about product value and product availability were the key inhibitors leading tourists not to purchase destination cards. Regarding the importance of destination card offerings, the participants perceived the most important card benefit to be a free admission ticket to major attractions. Furthermore, they rated a discount on pocket Wi-Fi rental as the second most important offering, and their third choice was free use of public transportation.

KEYWORDS:

• Destination cards
• tourist cards
• card offerings
• motives

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on improving an early version of this paper. The author would also like to thank the encouragement and support by the Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor. This project is partly supported by a research grant funded by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Daniel Leung, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He has authored/co-authored a number of research articles in first-tier academic journals, and his research interests are in the areas of electronic marketing, social media marketing as well as hotel and tourism website evaluation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Hong Kong Polytechnic University: [Grant Number 1-BE0L].