The focus of this research lies on the relationships between motivations, perceived values, satisfactions and behavioral intentions of those LOHAS tourists who are interested in healthy life and environmental friendly travel experience. Since LOHAS is a newly emerging trend, this study looks at definitions, motivations and compositions of LOHAS travel in order to improve the competitiveness of the industry.
It’s unique characteristics are worthy to examine because of its sustainable values for our future generations. The purpose of this research is fourfold.
First, this study provides a theoretical ground of LOHAS travel, particularly the relationships of motivations, perceived values, satisfaction and behavioral relationships.
Second, this study empirically examines the impact of LOHAS travel motivations to perceived values.
Third, this study further analyzes the impacts of LOHAS values and customer values on satisfactions.
Finally, this study looks at the relationship between satisfaction and behavioral intentions. As a result, this study revealed five LOHAS travel motivations, namely nature-related, escape-related, family-related, interest-related and healing-related.
After all, nature-related, interest-related and healing-related motivations had significant impacts on both LOHAS values and customer values. Moreover, LOHAS values played more important role in influencing satisfaction in comparison to customer values. The relationship between satisfaction and behavioral intentions were also proved to be significant.
As a result, it is important to develop LOHAS travel contents, programs and strategies accordingly. Since there is lack of current studies on LOHAS travel, this study is valuable theoretically. In addition, its practical values are also worthy to highlight for its applications to LOHAS destination management.
In the future, more researches should be conducted to reveal its potential impacts on lifestyles, sustainable tourism development, economic and non-economic values and to discover any obstacles for its further development by combining qualitative research methods.