Exploring the Influence of Multidimensional Tourist Satisfaction on Preferences for Wetland Ecotourism: a Case Study in Zhalong National Nature Reserve, China

Tourist satisfaction, as a principal element for sustainable development of wetland ecotourism and destination competitiveness, has received extensive attention in the research on its impact on behavioral intention. This paper employs choice experiment to study tourist satisfaction as an important motivation for behavioral intention of willingness to pay and preference on wetland ecotourism improvement policy, and explores the potential causal mechanism. A 15-item scale is designed to measure tourist satisfaction and four constructs are defined. Under the framework of discrete choice modeling, unidimensional and multidimensional data are incorporated as the standard for population segmentation and explanatory variables. The empirical results estimated by three methods basically confirms the proposed hypotheses and indicate that tourist satisfaction has a certain effect on tourist preference of wetland ecotourism and there is significant preference heterogeneity among groups with different satisfaction. Besides, different dimensions of satisfaction have a different effect on tourist preference of wetland ecotourism. This study enriches the studies on non-market value evaluation and preference motivation in the field of ecotourism, because tourist satisfaction may explain some unobserved preference heterogeneity. More effective wetland ecotourism policies can be designed when data on satisfaction are included.