What is the gap between curator’s plan and visitors’ perception of the palace museum?

ABSTRACT

The Palace Museum, well known as the Forbidden City, is one of the most splendid and valuable cultural treasures of China and a World Cultural Heritage. During the past 10 years many improvements and changes have been made in the Palace Museum, however, it is more important to know whether and to which extent visitors are satisfied with their experience. Although prior research has discussed the strategic management of the curator, little is done to combine tourists’ perception with the curator’s performance. To address this issue, a mixed method is applied to compare the planned action from the leader’s perspective and the online review from tourists’ comments, by analyzing the operation of Shan from 2012 to 2019 and online reviews of tourists from three major Chinese tourism websites. This research is innovative insofar as it provides a new theoretic framework to evaluate the curator’s performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Museum
• performance
• destination image
• online reviews
• mixed method

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hongxing Cao

Hongxing Cao, since 2002, she has lectured Marketing related courses for different programs. She is conducting service marketing research.

Huadan Zhang

Huadan Zhang is a master’s student of School of English and International Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University. Now she is teaching Middle School in Yunnan Province as a volunteer teacher.

Xuechun Wang

Xuechun Wang is a master’s student of International Business School, Beijing Foreign Studies University. She was a volunteer in Beijing Winter Olympic Game in 2022.