Sep 27, 2023PRESS RELEASE
Professor Takashi Oguchi of the College of Contemporary Psychology and his colleague receive the Best Paper Award at the 28th Asia Pacific Tourism Association Annual Conference
Keyword:RESEARCH
OBJECTIVE.
Professor Takashi Oguchi of Rikkyo University’s College of Contemporary Psychology and Dr. Atsushi Kawakubo, an adjunct lecturer at the college, received the Best Paper Award at the 28th Asia Pacific Tourism Association Annual Conference, which was held in Chiang Mai, Thailand, July 5-7, 2023.
The award-winning paper is entitled “The Influence of Crowding, Popularity, and Time-monetary Costs on Theme Park Experience and Satisfaction.” It provides scientific verification of how tourism affects people psychologically. The research was conducted as part of Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) “Psychological Effects of Tourism” of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.
In the paper, Prof. Oguchi and Dr. Kawakubo explain the relationship between crowding, popularity, and satisfaction of a theme park as follows:
People feel a theme park is popular while crowding with visitors. At the same time, it isn’t fun to visit an excessively crowded theme park. So, we elucidated how the crowdedness and popularity of theme parks affect people’s experience and satisfaction. According to our analyses, the more crowded the park is, the more popular people believe it is. However, the high crowdedness compromises the quality of the visitors’ experience. Visitors therefore feel greater satisfaction if the theme park is more popular and the higher the quality of their experience is. If their satisfaction is high, people spread good reviews by word of mouth about the theme park, post about the park on social media, and spend more money there, making it more likely that they will want to revisit it. In a nutshell, the research results suggest that maintaining popularity while reducing crowdedness will enhance theme park visitors’ satisfaction and boost profits for park operators. The findings shed light on how the operators should manage theme parks.
Comment
At the award presentation ceremony
Professor Takashi Oguchi
Thanks to the understanding and cooperation of the Dean of the College of Contemporary Psychology, my colleagues, and university staff (particularly those at the Research Initiative Center who helped me carry out my research), I received the award. I would also like to thank everybody at the College of Contemporary Psychology and the Graduate School of Contemporary Psychology. I could not have received the award without their support. I want to pursue my research further while working with corporations to contribute more to society through more research results.