As South Korea’s inbound tourism market expands, international visitors’ expenditure has become an increasingly important contributor to destination-level economic performance. However, much of the existing literature explains tourist spending through single-motive perspectives or net-effect, linear models, leaving limited room to capture how multiple motives co-occur and jointly shape outcomes. Using 2024 Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) data, this study applies fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to identify configurational ‘recipes’ of travel motivations associated with both high spending and high satisfaction. The results indicate that high expenditure is most commonly linked to urban consumption bundles (e.g. K-pop-related experiences, shopping, and health services), whereas satisfaction is more strongly associated with cultural engagement and experiential value, including cultural immersion, culinary experiences, shopping, and cosmetic/medical services. Cross-outcome comparisons further show that motivation bundles may operate in complementary and substitutive ways across the two outcomes, highlighting the causal complexity of tourist motivation. Theoretically, the study enriches motivation research by introducing a configurational lens, extends the expectation–perception discrepancy logic to accommodate dual outcomes (economic spending and experiential satisfaction), and clarifies how different motivational pathways contribute unequally to economic versus experiential goals. Practically, it offers evidence to support Korea-specific destination marketing and more targeted promotion strategies.
Geng et al. (Tue,) studied this question.