A Comparative Study based on Slow City Principles and Defining Slow Tourists Types in Korea

This research examines the tourists’ types of slow tourism focusing on slow cities of Hadong in Korea. First purpose of the study is to find of the importance of primary and secondary attractiveness elements for choosing Hadong as a slow tourism destination. Secondly, it is significant to analyze slow tourists’ types based on slow city principles provided by Cittaslow Charter (1999) to classify Hadong visitors. Finally, this research is designed to examine tourists’ satisfaction level after experiencing slow tourism in Hadong. The pilot study was conducted with 40 randomly selected visitors in April 2011. After the pilot study, some modifications were made on the questionnaire and main survey was conducted from 3rd to 8th May 2011. Total of 350 questionnaires were distributed and collected 318 valid responses. With regard to destination attractiveness, 12 out of 15 elements were found statistically significant and three elements of nightlife, variety of shopping facilities and variety of car rental services, were found not significant. It is because respondents know Hadong is located in rural area they did not expect facilities such as shopping places. The result shows that there are statistically significant differences between means of three visitor types of DST, PST and AST. Dedicated Slow Tourists (DST), had the largest visitor group of 60% of all respondents with a high mean score of 4.48 and 32.1% of the second group was named as Preferred Slow Tourists (PST) with a mean score of 3.45. Only 7.9% of the respondents were included in the final group and named as Accidental Slow Tourists (AST) with a mean score of 2.31. AST group is general tourists who can be called as mass tourists. Since mountain oriented areas are known as quite and nature orientated, the author expected to have high level of preferences from DST and PST. But it was not important for DST and PST groups as expected.