Tourists’ spatio-temporal behaviour and concerns in park tourism: Giant Panda National Park, Sichuan, China

ABSTRACT

To understand the recreational uses of national parks, a field investigation was employed at Giant Panda National Park, Sichuan. Through a mixed-methods approach and visual portrayal of the spatio-temporal behaviours of four types of visitors is undertaken and associated demographic and other features described. Tourists’ concerns regarding wilderness tours are found to be comprised of three dimensions “physical safety,” “travel comfort” and “quality of experience.” A focus upon weather-related matters reveals that visitors intend to adjust differently in response to different degrees of bad weather. Implications for Chinese national park management are provided.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourists’ spatio-temporal behaviour
• tourists’ concern
• wildlife tourism
• weather
• tourism marketing
• Asia Pacific
• nature-based tourism
• national park
• Giant Panda
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science foundation of China [grant number 41601129]; the Fundamental Research Funds of the Central University [grant number 2015ZCQ-YL-04].