Understanding the wine tourism experience is indispensable to the development of a wine tourism destination. This study tested an integrated model to obtain a better understanding of the wine tourism experience. The proposed model included both perceived wine tourism facilitators and constraints to examine their effects on wine tourism experience and tested the moderating role of involvement in these effects. Using Chinese outbound wine tourists in Australia as the study sample, this study identified that winery fame, interpersonal facilitators, and local attractions are three facilitating factors, while personal language and transportation barriers and time and information barriers were the perceived constraining factors. Both interpersonal facilitators and local attractions positively affected wine tourism experience; however, winery fame negatively influenced wine tourism experience. The study found that involvement moderated the effects of facilitators/constraints on wine tourism experience. For high-involvement wine tourists, the effect of local attractions is pronounced, while interpersonal facilitator negatively influences their wine tourism experience. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This study profiles the Chinese wine tourist market based on levels of consumer involvement. Using a sample of 503 Chinese wine tourists visiting Australian wineries, the study identified four dimensions of involvement in wine tourism among Chinese tourists: Interests and Importance, Risk Importance and Possibility, Risk Avoidance, and Status Value. Based on the various levels of involvement, four clusters of Chinese wine tourists were identified: low-involvement wine tourists, highly involved wine tourists, interest-driven wine tourists, and high-risk perception wine tourists. For the group size, high-risk perception wine tourists included the highest number of people in the sample, while a relatively small number of people belonged to the interest-driven group. Significant differences were found for behavioral variables and activity participation level across the four clusters, but similarity outweighed the differences among demographic and socio-economic variables. The research proceeded to theoretical and marketing implications.

Social media, online review and photo posting have created an impact on hotel guest experience. This study explores how tourists capture their experience on memorable hospitality services via each stage of the long-term memory system (i.e. encoding, consolidation and retrieval). User-generated content was analyzed from three five-star hotels in Guangdong Province, China, and linked with each stage of the memory system to highlight the concepts of mindfulness, working memory, self-identity, remembering and storytelling on the memories of guests. Among the three stages of the long-term memory system, stage 1-encoding received the highest weight, followed by stage 3-retrieval and stage 2- consolidation. This result corroborates that practitioners can focus on the opportunities of the memory consolidation (stage 2) and retrieval (stage 3) of tourists. From a theoretical perspective, this study contributes by demonstrating how a long-term memory framework derived from psychology research could be used to provide a broad investigation of the memories of guests in hospitality research. Moreover, this study exhibited how the combination of text-based guest reviews and shared photographs of positive and negative memories can be used in memory-related hospitality studies. Hence, this study elucidated how a long-term memory framework could be a relevant reference for hospitality practitioners and researchers.

The fast growth of the Chinese economy has transformed Chinese outbound tourism into one of the major players in the tourism industry worldwide. However, Chinese outbound tourists may still encounter travel constraints in some countries, such as Japan, which has had a close and complicated relationship in history with China. This study adopted the qualitative approach by applying focus group and in-depth interviews to investigate and triangulate the travel barriers affecting Chinese outbound travel to Japan. The findings indicated that domestic nationalist sentiment played a key constraining role in influencing Chinese outbound travel decision-making, followed by current political factors, while quality products and service, as well as social environment encouraged tourists to travel. This research also found that visitors and non-visitors have perception differences in terms of travel barriers and attractiveness of travel.