Stability of preferences for types of tourism experiences: evidence from online reviews by repeat visitors to Japan

Academic and practical perspectives in tourism marketing highlight the importance of understanding how tourists select destinations. A key factor affecting destination choice is tourists’ preferences for particular tourism experiences, underscoring the need to consider the stability of these preferences over time. Preference stability is an important consideration in tourism marketing strategies. However, few empirical studies have examined the stability of tourism experience preferences, possibly because of difficulties associated with data collection. Accordingly, this study used online travel reviews to identify attraction visitation patterns among repeat visitors to Japan during their first and second trips and compared experience types across these visits. The findings showed that two-thirds of tourists did not demonstrate consistent experience preferences across trips, which casts doubt on previous research claims that such preferences are stable.