An Examination of Salient Dimensions of Senior Tourist Behavior: Relationships among Personal Values, Travel Constraints, Travel Motivation, and Quality of Life (QoL)

Retiring from work is a major personal and professional transition and has a major influence on one's life. It is imperative that these retired individuals endeavor to adjust to this life and change and learn to effectively manage their time. Tourism and gerontology researchers have been aware of the importance of seniors tourism and leisure activities to enhance their well-being. However, limited attention has been recently devoted to senior consumers, who are still often not included in a range of marketing practices in tourism studies. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on senior tourists who are over the age of 65 and retired, and mainly focuses on a senior's travel motivation, and examines the antecedents of travel motivation; personal values and travel constraints and their consequences; satisfaction with salient life domains of QoL, and overall QoL.

The sample population of seniors residing in Jeju, South Korea was surveyed. A final sample of 328 were subjected to data analysis. Structural equation modeling (SEM), Chi-square difference test, independent t-tests, and multi-group analysis were performed to test the hypotheses.

The findings of this dissertation revealed that a positive relationship between personal values and travel motivation of seniors. This means that if the senior tourists with strong personal values, then they are more motivated to go travel. On the other hand, travel constraints did have negative significant influence on travel motivation. Another finding of the study showed that travel motivation affect their satisfaction with different life domains; if they are highly motivated, they are more satisfied with their life domains including family, social, emotional, leisure and health life, which in turn contribute to their overall quality of life. Findings also indicated that statistical significance of the moderating effect in the model, thus suggesting that there were some meaningful moderating effects of the type of leisure activity patterns on the relationship between satisfaction with life domains and overall quality of life. The study also provided managerial implications for tourism marketers and destination managers.