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Abstract
The characteristics of independent Chinese outbound tourists are addressed from five aspects: sociodemographic characteristics, motivations, decision-making process, spatial pattern of destinations, and consumer patterns. Comprehensive study methods including a questionnaire, in-depth interview and content analysis of online travelogues are adopted to present a distinct profile of these tourists that is generally absent from former research. Key findings are that these tourists could be categorized as middle class in China and their main motivation remains sightseeing, followed by leisure/holiday and business. “Doing homework” is a seemingly indispensable matter for them to make decisions. The macro spatial pattern is changing with more optional destinations, and the micro spatial pattern distinguishes them from group tourists. Their consumer modes are categorized as frugal, hedonistic and mixed.
Acknowledgements
This paper was sponsored by Scientific Research Funding of Ningbo University (Project No. 2011003) and China National Tourism Academia (Project No. 11TABG022).
Notes
So Chinese outbound tourists studied in this paper refer to those visiting foreign countries except Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau.
The quotations from interviewees’ words and travelogues are labelled in this paper correspondingly as RI1, RI2 … RI39 and RT1, RT2 … RT39. Here R means Respondent, I/T refer to Interview/Travelogues, and the Arabic number means the serial number of interviewee in this research.
In that research, shopping was not listed as a motivation choice, so no direct comparison is possible here.