Tourists' Satisfaction: Benefits of Inconvenience Aspect

The routes between Thailand and Kunming, China, including Lao PDR have been developed since 1992 following the GMS program to promote ASEAN economics. Besides cross-border trade developments, these routes also aim to ease travels of tourists who want to explore foreign cultures and get experiences in neighboring countries. These routes attract attention from tourism industries because of the projects. Most popular styles of travel on the routes are natural and cultural tourism. Usually, we believe that more conveniences are better for tourists. Thus we develop many convenient facilities, such as shopping malls, hotel franchises, bank branches in tourism areas. However, such convenient facilities may not be preferred by tourists who like natural and cultural tourism. For example, some people enjoy camp in mountains where do not have any convenient facilities, and some people visit backwoods where quite difficult to get to. To understand such behaviors, a new motive which replaced by “convenience” is required. In the concept of “benefit of inconvenience (BI),” such kind of the motivations are discussed. In this paper, a framework for analyzing the tourists’ satisfaction in these routes is proposed based on the concept of BI. Then relationship among each factor of tourists’ satisfaction is analyzed by using the framework.