Exploring the effects of consumer ethnocentrism on preference of choosing foreign airlines: A perspective of Chinese tourists

This research explored effects of consumer ethnocentrism on preference of choosing foreign airline from a perspective of Chinese tourists which has never been addressed by other researches before. A variation of demographic characteristics toward consumer ethnocentric tendencies between tourists from Mainland China and Taiwan was found through a comparison of hypotheses testing result of this research. The key findings of this research revealed that consumer ethnocentrism could be an appropriate indicator with a good reliability to predict Chinese tourist's preference on choosing foreign airline. While different demographics of Chinese tourists such as gender, age, education and income level to the scale of consumer ethnocentric tendencies (original CETSCALE was developed by Shimp and Sharma in 1987) all have significant differences except employment situation (employee and employer). Several important managerial implications derived from these research findings for marketers of foreign airlines located in China and Taiwan are presented at the end of this article.