Transformations  in
Business & Economics

INVESTIGATING CONSUMER’S BEHAVIORAL INTENTIONS OF WELLNESS TOURISM HAINAN¹²
Kaixin Wangzhou, Lei Qiu, Julie Jie Wen, Felicity Picken

ABSTRACT: In the 21st century, wellness tourism has become a popular trend of tourism activity for people to meet their needs for wellness and leisure. As a sunrise industry, wellness tourism has great market potential and a prospective future in China. This study aims to analyze wellness tourists’ consumer behavior and examine the factors that influence their travel intention related to wellness tourism in Hainan. For this purpose, different data analysis techniques are applied to evaluate the research data from the online self-administered survey. Primarily, AMOS 17.0 software is employed to code and ascertain the full data set. The results showed that perceived behavioral control (PBC), subjective norm (SN), perception of a tourist destination (PER), past behavior (PB), and wellness lifestyle (LIFE) are significantly related to the behavioral intention of wellness tourism. PER is discovered to serve as a significant mediating variable in the formation mechanism of wellness tourism travel intention (INT)(β=0.064, P=0.003). Additionally, the moderating effect of LIFE has also been examined and verified in the ETPB model’s relationships between SN, PBC, and INT. And the path coefficient (β= 0.152, P < 0.001) indicated that the direct influence of LIFE on INT is statistically significant. The study findings contribute to the field of wellness tourism research. This study not only addresses the people’s needs for leisure and well-being in the process of rapid economic development but also represents the notion of wellness tourism.

KEYWORDS:  theory of planned behavior, wellness tourism, wellness lifestyle, consumer behavior, perception of tourist destination.

JEL classification:  Z3, Z31, Z32, Z33.

¹²Acknowledgments:  This research project was funded by the Hainan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China, Research on the formation mechanism of tourists’ behavioral intentions of wellness tourism under the regular epidemic prevention and control policy (723QN244); Hainan Medical University, Research on the health self-management model of college students (X202211810053).