National tourism standards and local practices: Based on the experience of Tibet, China

ABSTRACT

Tourism standards are critical to standardizing the development of the tourism industry. Tourist attractions, being the core of tourism products, have a variety of characteristics and individualities. It is however, difficult to standardize different types of tourist attractions according to the same tourism standards. Such standardization is also incompatible with tourist attractions’ construction according to the national tourism standards from the local perspective. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the universality and particularity of tourism products and their influence on establishing tourism standards. From the perspective of placeness, it is essential to explore how to improve the fairness and universality of national tourism standards. This study takes the Tibet Autonomous Region as a case to reveal the theoretical basis of tourism standards by considering regional development imbalances and diversity of tourism products. The research shows that the core framework and principles should be unified when National Tourism Standards are applied to local practice but attach importance to the weightage of the software facilities scoring and leave space for the finer details. So that tourism standards can be adapted to different regions to develop tourism with local characteristics. This study enriches the theoretical basis study of tourism standards.

摘要: 旅游标准是规范旅游行业发展, 提高旅游产品质量的重要抓手。旅游景点作为旅游产品的核心, 具有多样性和独特性。不同类型的旅游景点很难按照相同的旅游标准进行标准化。因此, 有必要识别旅游产品的普遍性和特殊性及其对制定旅游标准的影响;并从地方性视角出发探讨如何提高国家旅游标准的公平性和普适性。本研究以中国西藏自治区为例, 通过考虑区域发展的不平衡性和旅游产品的多样性, 揭示旅游标准制定遵循的理论原则。研究表明, 国家旅游标准应用于地方实践应保持标准的核心框架和原则统一, 重视软件设施评分的权重, 并在细节上留有空间。使旅游标准能够适应不同地区的需要, 发展地方特色的旅游。该研究丰富了旅游标准的研究成果。

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism standard
• tourist attraction
• placeness
• eco-environmental protection
• tibet autonomous region
• Tibet Autonomous Region

Keywords:

• 关键词
• 旅游标准
• 旅游景区
• 地方性
• 西藏自治区
• 生态环境保护

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank our research participants, who gave their valuable time to share their thoughts and experiences with us.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant [No. 41920104002]

Notes on contributors

Zhongjuan Ji

Zhongjuan Ji is Ph.D. candidate at Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China. She has conducted researches in pro-poor tourism, self-gentrification in sustainable tourism, residents’ perception of tourism, etc. Now, her research covers ecotourism, sustainable tourism and community-based tourism.

Honggang Xu

Honggang Xu is Professor and Dean of the School of Tourism Management at Sun Yat-sen University, China. Her research interests include ecotourism, sustainable tourism, tourism mobilities and system dynamics. Her research mainly concerns human-nature relationships, tourist mobilities and sustainable tourism.

Qingming Cui

Qingming Cui is Distinguished Researcher in the School of Tourism Management at South China Normal University (SCNU), China. His research interests include wildlife tourism, ecotourism, sustainable tourism and tourism social theories. His research pursues to understand human-animal/nature relationships in the tourism context from a social-cultural approach.

Peng Yang

Peng Yang is Lecturer in the School of Economics and Management at Shanghai University of Sports, China. His research interests include tourist mobilities and sustainable tourism.