Identifying the vacation travel innovator

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Abstract
Managers of many tourism businesses would like to determine which vacation travellers are most likely to be the earliest buyers of a new vacation product. Goldsmith and Hofacker1 created a short, reliable and valid self-report scale, the Domain Specific Innovativeness Scale ( DSI), to measure level of consumer innovativeness for tangible goods, shown also to identify innovators in service businesses effectively. This paper describes the results of a study using the DSI to identify tourism inno vators, those travellers who are most likely to choose a new travel option when one appears in the marketplace, based upon the data in a survey of 184 consumers visiting a trade show in Singapore. The findings show that the DSI was positively correlated with several hypothesised variables: vacation travel involve ment, product knowledge , opinion leadership for vacation destinations, travel information seeking behaviour, vacation frequency and total vacation trips taken annually. These results substantiate the validity and usefulness of the DSI for identifying tourism innovators and extend its application cross-culturally.

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