THE IMPACT OF TOURISM ON QUALITY OF LIFE: A SEGMENTATION ANALYSIS OF THE YOUTH MARKET

Despite the importance of the youth tourism market to the tourism industry, research on the impact of tourism on quality of life (QOL) of this market and on the factors that influence this impact is still very limited. This article contributes to overcoming the research gap in this field, implementing a segmentation approach based on the impact of tourism on features related to several domains of youth tourists' QOL (physical health, psychological features, social relationships, and environment). This approach was empirically tested with a sample of university students. The impact of tourism on youth tourists' QOL was assessed using an adapted version of the WHOQOL-BREF scale. The results reveal that tourism has an impact on the QOL of youth tourists and that this market is heterogeneous regarding the perceptions of this impact. Moreover, travel motivations, host-tourist interactions, the travel group, and the type of destination visited seem to be the factors that have a higher influence on the perceptions of the impact of tourism on QOL. The article ends with some theoretical and practical contributions to the marketing and development of tourism destinations.