Is tourist walkability and well-being different?

ABSTRACT

Despite the environmental and health importance of tourist walking, specific research on walking and tourism is limited, with walking in leisure and work contexts often being used as a proxy. To fill this gap, this study identifies the effects of perception of air quality and mitigating climate change on attachment to walking relevant to walkable places and subjective well-being, along with comparing tourism, leisure, and work activity groups in walking, verifying six hypotheses. The findings of this study shed light on the effects of environmental factors (perception of air quality and climate change mitigation) on attachment to walking, providing new knowledge to the tourism and active transport literature. Attachment to walking and walkable place are key predictors for walkers’ subjective well-being. Importantly, walking when a tourist is significantly different from walking for leisure and work, providing potential insights for the development of behavioural interventions to encourage walking.

KEYWORDS:

• Walking
• perception of air quality
• climate change mitigation
• subjective well-being
• active transport
• South Korea

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to appreciate the editors and anonymous reviewers for their time and contributions to this study. The authors also thank Injae Cho, Donghyeon Kim, Minseong Kim, Sang Youn Kim, Dong Uk Kim, and Sangwoo Kim for their thoughtful advice and refining the survey instrument.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).