Luxury shopping orientations of mainland Chinese tourists in Hong Kong: Their shopping destination

Abstract

Previous literature has focused on luxury tourism or luxury shopping, revealing that luxury-driven attitudes comprised unveiled reasons such as materialism, a desire for social status and the need to conform with others. Different outlets play different roles in the enactment of shopping attitudes, but even this has been scarcely researched within the context of tourism. This research combines these three areas of research in order to assess how materialism, the desire for status or to conform with others enact tourists’ intentions of buying luxuries while on holiday, within different outlets. A sample of 314 tourists in Hong Kong was used to test eight hypotheses, by means of an ordered probit model. The study’s findings enlighten the social nature of luxury tourists’ shopping behaviours, a nature that depends not only on what they buy but also largely on where they buy.