La percepció sobre la destinació, la motivació per viatjar, la recerca de valors dels turistes xinesos, i les connexions d'ells

• Autores: Ruizhe Fang
• Directores de la Tesis: Jordi Rosell Foxà (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2021
• Idioma: catalán
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Juan Antonio Duro Moreno (presid.), Gemma Cànoves (secret.), Mingge Tian (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Turismo por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
• Resumen

  • Tourism consumption has become increasingly common among Chinese people, as a result of the economic growth and the development of life quality in China. Since 1983 when Chinese international tourism started to open to the public, the Chinese outbound travel market kept flourishing. In 2014, China became the world’s largest outbound tourism market, being the country of origin with the highest tourist departures and expenditure. Chinese tourists turn to be an important part of international tourism, and more researchers and tourism practitioners are interested in better understanding people from this emerging market. The knowledge regarding how Chinese tourists perceive tourism destinations and what motivates them to travel to different places is direct and essential.

    The current mixed-method study aims at identifying the Chinese tourists' perceived attributes of tourism attractions, their travel motivations, and value pursuit, and exploring and testing the cognitive structure regarding travel motivations in the outbound travel context. Practically, Barcelona was used as the destination for this study. The exploratory sequential design is followed, as a quantitative study is conducted after a qualitative study phase. The photo-elicitation interview technique was used for qualitative data collection. Qualitative results include the lists of perceived attributes, travel motivations, and personal values, which were obtained with inductive and deductive content analysis. Inductive analysis ensured that the information uncovered by previous literature but mentioned by respondents is identified properly, while deductive analysis made the most of widely accepted definitions and well-determined items at attribute, motivation, and value levels. Th quantitative study phase aims at generating more generalizable and objective results. A questionnaire designed based on qualitative results works as the quantitative data collection instrument. The statistical analysis produced quantitative results that were finally integrated with qualitative results to provide unbiased and also context-rich findings, thus offering deeper insights for the research question.

    The current study updated the lists of perceived destination attributes, travel motivations, and personal values in China's outbound travel context. New China-specific items include "Daka (打卡)" at the motivation level, and "Mianzi (面子)", "Filial piety (孝顺)", "Devotion to children(望子成龙)" at the personal value level. Although, the China-specific items were then found to be low-positioned in the obtained importance rankings of perceived attributes, travel motivations, and personal values. The Chinese tourists' motivational cognitive structures were constructed and presented with hierarchical value maps, where the items at attribute, motivation, and value levels are linked by important connections. Moreover, the influence of socio-demographic characteristics on the rankings of and connections among the attribute, motivation, and value items was determined.

    The current study brings both qualitative and quantitative research approaches together to enhance the integrity of findings. A qualitative stage provided contextual understanding coupling with generalizable findings uncovered through a quantitative stage. The research demonstrated a method applicable to different tourism destinations and tourists from different origins adapting the varying social and cultural contexts. The research findings enriched travel motivation literature by taking into account not only the concepts in perceived attributes, travel motivations, and personal values but also the connections among the items at these three levels with different degrees of abstraction. Based on the results, practical implications for the marketing and management of destinations, including but not limited to Barcelona, were discussed.