Experiential Tourism di Danau Toba Kabupaten Samosir

Abstract

Tourism is a new kind of industries that enables to accelerate the economic growth, provide job opportunities, increase income, life standard, and stimulate other productive sectors. In tourism context, satisfaction is known as a part of hope before traveling and experience after traveling. A tourist will be satisfied when he experiences more than what he hopes. However, if he is not happy, he will not be satisfied. A tourist satisfaction can be influenced by his experiences when he visits a tourist destination. Experience can be the key to the success of tourism industries. In this context, tourism experience can be classified into experiential quality and value. A tourist who visits Lake Toba will get his own experience in his holyday. Experience will determine whether or not a tourist will re-choose Lake Toba as his tourist destination which is influenced by his satisfaction. The research objective is to analyze the impact of the experiential quality on the tourist satisfaction through the experiential value. The variables consist of experiential quality, experiential value, and tourist satisfaction. Accidental sampling method is used in this survey. The population is the domestic tourists visiting Lake Toba in Kabupaten Samosir. One hundred and forty (140) tourists are chosen as the samples. The data are analyzed with PLS-SEM using SmartPLS 3.0 Program. The results show that the experiential quality influences significantly on the experiential value, experiential quality influences significantly on the tourist satisfaction, the experiential value influences significantly on the tourist satisfaction through the experiential value.