Special interest tour preferences and voluntary simplicity lifestyle

Purpose – This research aims to treat voluntary simplicity lifestyle (VSL) as general lifestyle and explore the correlation between VSL and selection preference of special interest tourism (SIT). Design/methodology/approach – This research adopts a questionnaire survey. The content of the questionnaire include questions on participants' demographic variables, VSL, and selection preference of SIT. After designing the questionnaire of selection preference of SIT, this research treats the tourists in the Taiwan Guandu bird‐watching area as the targets and distributes the questionnaires. This research adopts systematic sampling for questionnaire distribution. Findings – The following results are found: a positive correlation between selection preference of SIT and VSL; females are mostly allocated as the recreation and entertainment type people preferring SIT, the educational level of diverse interest type people preferring SIT tend to be higher, and these people have a more significant VSL; people who are the low degree of identification type with voluntary simplicity reveal almost the least scores in terms of all kinds of traveling preference, whereas complete involvement type individuals show a higher degree of preference. Research limitations/implications – This questionnaire is not exclusive. In other words, the respondents can provide extremely high, medium, or low scores for the preference for any kind of trips. Thus, the respondents' real preference sequence cannot be distinguished. Future studies can modify this questionnaire. The questionnaire of selection preference of SIT designed by this research mainly followed the SIT itineraries promoted on traveling websites and upon certain processes. Thus, this questionnaire content is based on the view of the supply end. Originality/value – This research follows the suggestions of McKercher and Chan, and after internet searching, the method imitates content analysis to establish a questionnaire with 18 questions with respect to the selection preference of SIT. Through factor analysis, the researchers select four kinds of selection preference of SIT, including traveling preference of recreation and entertainment, natural ecology, physical exploration, and history and art. In addition, this research also uses confirmatory factor analysis to confirm the convergent validity of the VSL questionnaire developed by the authors (2005).