Authentic tourism experiences, identity orientations, experience quality and collective effervescence: A Holistic model proposal in the context of scuba diving tourism

Authenticity is one of the most widely studied and controversial topics in tourism literature. While the preliminary studies on authenticity focused on the originality of tourism objects, subsequents have approached from a socially-constructed perspective, and the contemporary literature focuses from an experiental and existential standpoint. This broadens the scope of the concept and offers an extensive research framework. However, there are gaps in the literature regarding the relationship between identity orientations and authenticity. Authentic tourism experiences explain an individual's self-construction and self-definition, whereas identity orientations focus on different aspects of self-concept. Another shortcoming in the tourism experience literature is that the ritualistic group processes of experience have not been sufficiently examined. In this context, the concept of collective effervescence was utilised to address the collective aspects of group behavior in a niche tourism experience, which can be seen as a small and relatively closed group activity. The concept of tourism experience quality was employed to evaluate the tourism experience, while satisfaction and place attachment were included as outcome variables in the research model. Satisfaction and place attachment are determinants of tourists' loyalty behaviors towards the related activity and the destination as a physical space; thus, they were included in the research model. The proposed holistic model analyzed the relationships between identity orientations, authenticity, collective effervescence, experience quality, satisfaction and place attachment. The sample of the research was international diving tourists in Kaş district of Antalya; the data were collected from the diving schools located in Kaş. The data obtained from 351 participants were found suitable for the analysis; and Bayesian SEM was conducted to test the hypotheses. The results indicated that identity orientations has an effect on authenticity, whilst authenticity has an effect on both experience quality and collective effervescence; experience quality and collective effervescence have effects on satisfaction, and satisfaction has an effect on place attachment. Besides, authenticity was found to have no significant effect on satisfaction, validating the full mediating effect of experience quality and collective effervescence in the research model.