Understanding aesthetic experiences in nature-based tourism: The important role of tourists’ literary associations

In nature-based tourism, the aesthetic experience is the core element, and contributes to tourist loyalty, but there is still a surprising paucity of empirical research specifically related to aesthetic experiences. An ‘aesthetic experience’ is used in this paper to refer to a subjective process in which individuals are sensually stimulated by aesthetic qualities, thereby generating cognitive judgements and aesthetic-related emotions. Stimuli-Organism-Response (S–O-R) theory is adopted in this research in order to understand ‘aesthetic experience’ and its impact on tourist loyalty. However, an aesthetic quality perceived with the senses produces only physical stimulation but not necessarily an aesthetic experience. Whether sensory stimulation can produce an experience actually depends on a tourist's literary knowledge of a ‘natural’ site. Therefore, this study attempts to integrate literary association in natural aesthetic experiences and to investigate its effect on tourist loyalty. The quantitative results show that aesthetic quality can influence aesthetic emotion through aesthetic judgement, and that literary association can significantly and positively moderate such an effect. Further, aesthetic quality directly and indirectly affects loyalty, and aesthetic judgement and emotion play a mediating role moderated by literary association regarding the effect of aesthetic quality on tourist loyalty.