Who wears Hanfu clothing when they travel? Experience-based cultural tourism market segmentation – the case of Xi'an, China

ABSTRACT

The Han culture is the Chinese national culture as well as a significant part of the world's costuming heritage. However, Han clothes (Hanfu) are little known outside of China. This research selected Xi'an, a famous historical city, as the case to collect data using the survey questionnaire method. Factor analysis explored the variables involved in the cultural tourism experiences of wearing Hanfu clothing. Two-step clustering was used to prepare a market segmentation of this form of cultural tourism. The experience of wearing Hanfu clothing was influenced by the five factors of entertainment, aesthetics, culture, escape, and cosplay (costume play). Tourists who wore Hanfu clothing while travelling were classified into the four types of immersive cultural, aesthetic experience, culturally refined, and passing tourists. These groups had dissimilar socio-demographic characteristics and experience priorities. This research expands the knowledge on Hanfu clothing and cultural tourism experiences and provides insights for the management of cultural tourism destinations.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural tourism
• Hanfu clothing
• tourism experiences
• cosplay
• market segmentation

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Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2023.2209761)

Additional information

Funding

This study was partly supported by the Beijing Social Science Foundation Major Project [grant number 21JCA042] and the Ethnic research project of the National Committee of the People's Republic of China [grant number 2020-GMD-089].