Purpose: This study aims to identify the structural relationship among social capital, knowledge sharing, innovation and performance of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in a tourism cluster.Design/methodology/approach: A total of 199 valid questionnaires are collected from SMEs in the Bomun tourism cluster in South Korea. A structural equation modeling approach is used to test the research hypotheses.Findings: The findings suggest that social capital constructs, including network density of structural capital, relational capital and cognitive capital, all positively influence knowledge sharing among SMEs in the cluster. This implies that creating social capital is critical to enhancing the competitiveness of SMEs. This study confirms that knowledge sharing positively affects SME performance through innovation.Research limitations/implications: This study suggests that social capital, consisting of structural, cognitive and relational capital, facilitates increased knowledge sharing and innovation in a tourism cluster, which in turn enhances SME business performance.Practical/implications: This study suggests that tourism cluster policies should focus on how to create a friendly operational climate to build social capital and support SME innovation.Originality/value: This study contributes to the literature on social capital and innovation as well as the discourse on tourism clusters by addressing knowledge sharing among SMEs in a tourism cluster. It also expands the knowledge sharing and innovation literature by focusing on inter-organizational social networking among SMEs.

This study proposes that storytelling by medical tourism agents can be classified according to story and telling. Authenticity and educability are the key story attributes, while enjoyability, descriptiveness, and emotionality are the key telling attributes. A survey of 514 international tourists who visited South Korea mainly for medical purposes statistically validated these attributes and explored their impact on the trust and behavioral intention of medical tourists. The results show that the attributes of the story had less effect than the attributes of telling on increasing trust in medical tourists, and the degree of trust in turn positively predicted behavioral intention.

Based on an extensive literature review of the festival experience, this study proposes that the experiences of festivalgoers can be classified into five main attributes, namely Escape, Playfulness, Togetherness, Sacredness, and Placeness. A survey of 450 South Koreans who had participated in some type of domestic festival in the past year statistically validated these attributes and explored the impact of each on the perceived value, satisfaction, and behavioral intentions of festivalgoers. The study shows that those Koreans who experienced Playfulness, Sacredness, and Placeness at a festival tended to perceive the festival as more valuable than those who experienced Escape and Togetherness, which were factors that did not significantly affect the perceived value of the festival. This study illuminates the nature of festival attributes and the particular characteristics most important to Korean festivalgoers, both of which provide theoretical and practical implications for tourism researchers and festival organizers.

The current study is an exploration to examine older Japanese individuals' motivations for travel. The study employed an open-ended survey and in-depth interviews in order to gain insight into the creation of human relationships through tourism. Our results show that tourism is perceived as offering extraordinary opportunities to meet new people, and to form and develop new relationships by Japanese older individuals, who experience fewer opportunities to interact with other people in their everyday lives compared to individuals in younger generations. In particular, distinct features of tourism settings, such as liminality and touristic communitas, allow older tourists to express themselves more freely by escaping from their existing relationships as well as from many social norms, hierarchies, and prohibitions