Abstract
The purpose of this paper is twofold : to identify loyalty applicable to segmentation of theme park users and to find characteristics of the segments. Thetheme park was regarded as a product and Lotte World was regarded as a brand. One hundred thirty five college students were selected by nonprobability sampling for two waves thirty of data collection. Both behavioral and attitudinal dimension of loyalty were measured in the first wave by the proportion of visit of the Lotte World to 3 major theme parks for one year, including the Lotte World, and by calculating the mean score of selected 7 attitudinal items, respectively. After 14 weeks, the same respondents were asked the number of actual visits of the Lotte World. Medians of two dimensions and cluster analyses were utilized to classify the respondents into 4 categories : high, spurious, latent, and low loyalty. Then ANOVA and $$\chi$^2$ test of independence were conducted to find the difference in intention to visit the Lotte World and actual visitation of it among groups. Only intention was significantly different by the group and the mean score of intention was highest in the high loyalty group. Although no statistical difference was found in actual visitation among groups, the theory of planned behavior provided a theoretical support to conclude that the loyalty is a useful variable for segmentation of theme park users because intention is an antecedent variable to the behavior. Discriminant analyses showed that characteristics of each loyalty group can be differentiated by motivations and constraints. When median was a group classification criterion, 73.2 percent of high loyalty group was correctly classified. A few comments were suggested on data collection, and inclusion of new discriminant variables was discussed for the future research.