Psychographics and Destination Choice in Taiwan Media Tourists

Film or movie may cause an increase in visitor numbers at cultural tourism site, due to generate and sustain interest in a destination by having been exposed repeatedly to these cultural things. However, researchers have well known that demographic and socio-economic attributes alone are not enough in understanding vacation destination choices. Therefore, psychographics, emphasized by Plog in 1974, was defined as different destination attracted different personality characteristics and can be a predictor of destination choice. The purpose of this study was to investigate the evidences related to the relationships between psychographic and destination choice from the media tourists. As an example of the most popular 2011 Taiwanese movie "Seediq Bale", a historical event related to the conflict between ethnic groups, two tourism sites related to the movie were selected as study areas and distributed the questionnaire. The results from exploratory factor analysis show that there were four main psychographic characteristic. Moreover, all the respondents have been clustered as four groups from their main psychographic characteristic. The results found the constructs of psychographic characteristic group has significant differences across two tourism destinations. The results indicated qualified support for Plog's psychographic model within the media tourists. Future suggestions and management issues have been provided based on site level.