Understanding Novelty-Seeking Behavior in Meeting Tourism: A Measurement Development Approach

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to define the construct of novelty in the corporate meeting tourism perspective and to develop a preliminary instrument to measure novelty preference for corporate meeting destination choice. This article discusses in great detail literature relevant to novelty-seeking behavior in the context of marketing and tourism. Based on the literature and protocol analysis technique, the construct of novelty preference was found to comprise of three overlapping dimensions, namely destination familiarity, destination uniqueness, and destination excitement. Thus, novelty preference in this article is defined as the extent to which a corporate meeting planner prefers a destination setting that creates an unusual, unique, and exciting meeting travel experience. It was measured by calculating the mean responses to 19 items along a 6-point scale, where 6 depicted a very strong novelty preference for meeting destination while 1 depicted a very weak novelty preference. The initial scale was demonstrated to have content validity by panel of experts.