The Impact of TV Drama Attributes on Touristic Experiences at Film Tourism Destinations

The nature of film tourism phenomena has a close relationship with visual, aural, and textual media representations and aesthetic values of media program production. However, little research has explored how and to what extent such production values or attributes of media program influence, shape, and contextualize tourists' experiences at filmed locations. This current research addresses this paucity, and aims to empirically investigate the dimensions of production values and on-site film tourists' experiences and examine their relationships. Adopting a structured quantitative survey, the exploratory factor analysis identifies two salient dimensions to represent the production values of a TV drama, namely Story and Character and Locations and Aesthetic Effects. While previous research suggested that spectacular scenery and natural backdrop was considered as a major motivational driver in influencing audience's visit to film tourism destinations, the results of this study indicated that the dimension of Story and Character played the most significant role in explaining the level of on-site film tourists' experiences. Findings offer important implications for destination marketers and researchers in relation to better understanding of film tourism and its touristic experiences.