۱- Introduction

۲- Literature review

۳- Hypothesis development

۴- Research methods

۵- Results

۶- Conclusion and discussion

References

Abstract

The existing literature suggests that travel distance is a crucial factor that determines tourism demand and tourist behavior. However, there are limited attempts to understand how tourists’ travel distance shapes their experiences, and more specifically, their satisfaction in a destination. This paper aims to shed light on the distance–satisfaction relationship by analyzing a data set of online hotel reviews at four large US cities in a one-year period. The results show an inverted U-shaped relationship between travel distance and service satisfaction. Inflection points of the quadratic relationship across different cities are also identified. The implications of these findings contribute to literature on tourism geography and allow tourism marketers to develop more effective differential marketing strategies.

Introduction

From a geographical perspective, tourism is typically the movement of tourists to a non-routine environment for certain types of experiences, and the travel distance between origin and destination represents the effort that a tourist makes to overcome the geographical obstacles for travel. Therefore, travel distance has long been regarded as a vital parameter in understanding tourism demand and tourist behavior (Nyaupane et al., 2003; Nicolau, 2008; Larsen and Guiver, 2013; Yang et al., 2017). For example, the conventional gravity model from economic geography underscores a distance decay of tourism demand, suggesting that tourist volume to a destination is negatively associated with its distance to the origin. Accordingly, distance-based matrices, such as a market access index and intervening opportunity index, have been heavily used to understand the geographic pattern of tourism demand (Yang and Fik, 2014). Moreover, travel distance tends to influence tourist behavior in the destination, such as their duration of stay (Nicolau et al., 2016) and overall expenditure (Marcussen, 2011). In general, it is economic rationale for a traveler to stay longer and spend more in a distant destination to make the economic and time cost associated with the long haul travel worthwhile. Despite the abundant literature on understanding the effect of travel distance on tourism demand at both aggregate and individual levels, little is known about how tourists’ travel distance shapes their experiences, and more specifically, their satisfaction with accommodations that are key parts of travel experiences (Stevens, 1992). Some scholars in retailing and marketing have discussed the role of travel distance in evaluating shopping experiences. It has been identified that the consumers, in general, try to reduce the travel distance to the stores because the distance generates a negative impact on utility in forming the overall evaluation to the shopping behaviors (Darley and Lim, 1999; Hsu et al., 2010). However, along with the features of hospitality (i.e., intangibility and perishability) as well as tourism (i.e., novelty seeking motivation) (Jang and Feng, 2007; Wong et al., 1999), the distance–satisfaction relationship does not necessarily show identical patterns with the context of retailing. For instance, people have expectations to involve certain extent of distance that brings about perceptions of travel from their residential places. This would lead to a positive relationship of the travel distance to the satisfaction. Hospitality literature on understanding the distance–satisfaction relationship is largely paucity.