LANGELAND, ANGLER’S LAND MAY 31, 2017 Authors: Cristina Nicoleta Rat and Nicolas Borst Supervisor: Laura James Aalborg University (Aalborg) Acknowledgement We wish to firstly thank our supervisor Laura James, she has been the light in our darkness times and provided us with the so much needed help. She as well guided us in directions how to organise the project in a time schedule, making the last four months foreseeable. We also want to give a special thanks to Anne Mette Wandsoe - CEO at Langeland’s Tourist Organisation, Nina Brandt Jacobsen - Project Manager Nature Tourism I/S and Martin Lerkenfeld - Project and Marketing Director Seatrout Funen for the responsiveness they showed us. The inside information they have given during the interviews have been a great reference for the project. We want to thank also the 20 anglers who participated in in-depth interviews for opening their souls to us, we know is was not easy to talk about feeling and desires but their responses and argumentations have been essential data, needed to answer our problem formulation. Thank you, reader for your time devoted to this project. We hope when reading this master thesis, you will find the information relevant and helpful, enjoying the social world of anglers as much as we did. 1 Abstract Our interest in angling tourism has been influenced by the fact that we, the authors of the master thesis are taking over an accommodation facility on Langeland in the following year (2018). We have chosen to look at angling tourism as a possible market for future development and a possible tool to create competitive advantage. The aim of this master thesis is to investigate Langeland’s potential to develop as an angling destination. Firstly, we had to understand angler’s motivation and what pushes them towards travelling for angling, secondly to explore what destination attributes were preferred by anglers. Afterwards, we created a research based on interviews and desk research to evaluate if Langeland had potential to fulfil the requirements argued by anglers. We realised in the literature review that angler’s motivation often was driven by their level of specialisation in angling. Therefore, we included the anglers level of specialisation when analysing angler’s motivation, to explore if there were any modifications. In this project, we are following the interpretivist approach, which has helped us look at the social world from the particular position. Our collection of data was done by interviews with anglers in Region South Denmark where we discovered the anglers needs, desires and motivation for fishing. Subsequently, we have used desk research and interviews with experts to evaluate if Langeland has the destination attributes required by anglers. When conducting interviews with anglers, we used different interviewing technics like laddering in the context of means-end theory, narratives for identifying destination attributes leading to the relation between destination attributes and angler’s motivation. As a tool to explore angler’s motivation, we followed Pearce and Lee (2005) career travel pattern and substitute the level of travel experience proposed by Pearce and Lee (2005) with angler’s specialisation level following McIntyre & Pigram (1992) recreation specialisation theory. Following this method, we found the core motives of all angling tourist which includes escape/relax, relationship (strengthen), stimulation and nature. We as well discovered that high specialised anglers are driven by motives such as self-actualization, isolation, and nostalgia where lower specialised anglers are highly motivated by recognition and self-development. Furthermore, we followed Smith’s (1994) generic tourism product in correlation with angling literature (Ditton et al., 2002; Hunt, 2005; Moksness et al., 2011), to identify anglers preferred attributes. We found that the physical plant represented through the environmental quality, the fishing quality and facility development are the essential element in the development of angling tourism argued by anglers which is the strongest element offered by Langeland. 2 Table of Contents I. Table of figures ......................................................................................................................... 5 II. Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 7 a. Why Langeland? (study focus) .............................................................................................. 8 III. Problem Formulation............................................................................................................. 11 IV. Literature review .................................................................................................................... 14 a. The road towards product development ............................................................................ 14 b. Product development ............................................................................................................ 15 i. The Generic Product .......................................................................................................... 16 ii. Means-end theory .............................................................................................................. 23 c. Anglers motivation ................................................................................................................ 27 iii. Pearce Travel Career Approach ....................................................................................... 28 iv. Specialisation ...................................................................................................................... 31 v. Angler Typology and Behaviour Characteristics .......................................................... 34 V. Methodology and Research Design ..................................................................................... 41 a. Knowledge creation within tourism .................................................................................... 41 b. Key Philosophical Issues ....................................................................................................... 42 c. Research Design ..................................................................................................................... 45 vi. Qualitative methods .......................................................................................................... 45 vii. Data collection tools ....................................................................................................... 46 viii. Interviews with anglers ................................................................................................. 46 ix. Interviewing specialists ..................................................................................................... 51 x. Desk research ...................................................................................................................... 53 xi. Population Sample and Sites ............................................................................................ 53 xii. Data Analyses ................................................................................................................. 55 xiii. Quality of the research .................................................................................................. 58 xiv. Research Ethics ............................................................................................................... 59 VI. Data Analyses ......................................................................................................................... 61 3 a. Motivation to go on fishing holiday .................................................................................... 61 i. Specialisation level of anglers in Region South Denmark ............................................ 62 ii. Anglers motivation through Pearce Career Pattern ...................................................... 67 b. Destination attributes ............................................................................................................ 75 iii. Anglers desired destination attributes ............................................................................ 75 iv. Langeland Destination Attributes (an evaluation) ........................................................ 88 v. Synopsis of destination attributes (SWOT Analysis) .................................................... 97 VII. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 102 VIII.Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 108 IX. Appendix ............................................................................................................................... 119 4 I. Table of figures FIGURE 1 DENMARK ECONOMIC REGIONS/ POSITION OF LANGELAND, (KAZUBON, 2007) ............................... 9 FIGURE 2 THE GENERIC PRODUCT, SMITH 1994, P.587 ...................................................................................... 17 FIGURE 3 THE TOURISM PRODUCT, XU 2009, P.609 ........................................................................................... 20 FIGURE 4 A MEANS-END CHAIN (OWN PRODUCTION) ....................................................................................... 24 FIGURE 5 THE CAREER