Assessing tourism environmental psychological carrying capacity under different environmental situations

ABSTRACT

The tourism carrying capacity (TCC) is an important indicator to balance the tourists’ utility level and the quality of tourism environment. However, research on TCC focuses more on measuring the spatial carrying capacity of tourism resources using engineering measurement methods and completely ignores the experience of tourists. It violates the original intention of tourism destinations to provide leisure and entertainment for tourists. This paper attempts to evaluate tourism environmental psychological carrying capacity (TEPCC) in different environmental situations from the perspective of the visitor experience. First, we construct the utility theoretical framework of TEPCC based on consumer utility theory. Second, the choice experiment method is used to design questionnaires. The research team used the visual research method to visit 725 tourists of Shenyang National Forest Park in China. Finally, the conditional Logit model is used to calculate the threshold of TEPCC in different environmental situations in the park.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourist utility
• tourism carrying capacity
• tourism environmental psychological carrying capacity
• choice experiment method
• condition Logit model

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number: 41771147) and the Social Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grant Number: 19GLC012).