Space tourism marketing management considerations: locating in tourism spectrums, measuring motivated consumer innovativeness via moderating role of perceived risks, and challenging in environment

Abstract

The emerging space tourism has entered the pilot run phase. For the marketing management, there are still many considerations beyond the technology advancement. This study explores three aspects including its location in the tourism spectrums, consumer innovativeness via moderating role of perceived risks in space tourism, and potential challenging in environment. There are many spectrums in tourisms: lightness-darkness, cost, technology, adventure, comfort, popularity, safety and risk, etc. At this emerging pilot run phase, the space tourism has its high ends, i.e., high cost, high technology and high adventure, as well as its low ends, i.e., relatively low comfort and low popularity. Considering its extremely high cost at the current time, high-end tourists are particularly of interest in this study. For the impact of motivated consumer innovativeness (MCI) on perceived risk and word-of-mouth (WoM) communication about space tourism and its countermeasure considerations, perceived risk is the potential feeling of the tourist customer. A total of 313 valid questionnaires representing a 91.7 % response rate were collected through an online questionnaire survey. This research used multiple regression to examine the influence of MCI on positive WoM and the moderating role perceived risk plays in the relationships. The findings indicate that MCI is associated with improved consumer-positive WoM. The results also show that perceived risk moderates the relationship between MCI and WoM. Besides, potential risks of space tourism on the global environment due to the increases in rocket launch emissions and space debris are also studied as the third aspect.