Factors Which Influence Destination Choice in Northwest Asian Countries

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Secondly, I want to thank my friends for their very patient and time-consuming assistance in data collection and analysis. Needless to say, all their assistance has greatly facilitated the investigation and hence also enhanced the quality of this research. However, any faults remaining is my responsibility.

Finally, I want to express my sincere thanks to my classmates for the support, kindness, encouragement, and understanding which they have given to me for this paper.

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A Study of the Factors that Influence Chinese College Students' Choice of Travel Destination in Asian Countries

ChapterⅠ: Introduction

1.1 Problem Statement

Recently, the proportion of college students in whole Chinese tourists has increased sharply. College students have started be the major part of Chinese tourists sources. College students could be the biggest group in recent Chinese travel groups.

To show the tourism data in Guangdong province as the example. The government of Guangdong province(2016) said that During the Spring festival, the analysis of Guangdong tourism center showed that the number of 20~29 year old tourists who chose traveling abroad had occupied 63.53% of total tourists. And in this age group, the analysis showed that almost all of this age group were constituted by college students group. During the same period of time, Guangdong province analyzed the tourists that Guangdong has received. The number of tourists who went to Guangdong was 42.5 million, and 61% of it was college students.

According to the survey from CTS Outbound Tourism Center showed that more than 70% of their outbound tour groups were signed up by college students or college students and their parents. At the same time, the survey from ChinaIRN.com(2015) showed that during the winter vacation, summer vacation and other statutory holidays, the college students groups had occupied almost 75% of all tourists groups. The data shows that college

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students start to be a dominating position of Chinese tourists sources.

Because college students start to account a large proportion of Chinese tourists, this essay will focus on the factors which influence destination choice in Asian countries of Chinese college students.

During recent years, the number of Chinese tourists who choose Asian countries as the travel destination has increased obviously. To set Japan and Korea as the example. The data from Chongqin Youth Daily(2014) showed that the number of Chinese tourists who traveled to Japan which is one of the northeast Asian countries had reached 1,425,100. It has increased almost 40% than the number in 2013. Especially in August 2014, the number of Chinese tourists reached 280,000 which increased 101% than the same period of time in 2013. The number of Chinese tourists who traveled to Korea has reached 6,000,000 which is a very shocked number. It shows that northeast Asian countries start to be peak destinations for Chinese tourists.

During the same period of time, the number of travelers who choose Asian countries as the travel destination has kept almost stable. However, the trend is not that peak to compare to the trend in Europe. In some areas the number of Chinese travelers even shows a decreased trend. For instance, Qingdao News(2013) expressed that the number of Chinese travelers who went to Thailand was 968,700 in 2014, which decreased 17.77%. The same situation also happens in some traditional tourism destination in Southeast Asia such as Malaysia and Indonesia. The number of Chinese travelers decreased more than 5% both.

Therefore, it is significant to explore factors which could influence the destination choice in Asian countries. This paper will pay attention to find out which factors could cause these differences in Europe compare to other travel destinations.

1.2 Purpose of Study

This paper concentrates on identifying the factors which could make the biggest influence to destination choice in Asian countries of Chinese college students, and also find out the reason that northeast Asia has become a peak destination for Chinese tourists.

1.3 Significance of Study

1.3.1 Academic Part

Based on the literature review, most of the reviewers paid attention to the factors which influence Chinese residents travel destination choice while they travel domestically or travel to South America and European countries. Such as Wu (2005) indicated that Chinese residents make destination choice while travel domestically mainly focus on distance, type of attractions, the attitude to destination and demographic differentiation. However, there are few reviewers research on factors that influence Chinese travelers’ destination choice in Asian countries. Therefore, it is significant to recognize the factors which could influence travel destination choice in Asian countries.

1.3.2 Industrial Part

Based on the information from the Tuniu travel website and Caissa travel website, the price of tourism product of Asian countries has decreased almost 20%. (Tuniu.com, 2014) The travelers who choose the Asian tourism product as the choice of traveling has increased about 37% percent. The number of tourists who choose European countries as the travel destination has a huge increase during 2014 to 2015. The increasing trend is even much more peak than the traveling situation in European countries and American countries. Therefore, I think it is significant to find out the attributes which could influence the tourism situations in Asian countries violently.

1.4 Conceptual Framework

The conceptual framework of this paper is explaining the points from other people’s on the relationship of choice factors and the destination choice. Figure 1 represents the relationship between the two concepts of this article, which means that choice factors directly influence the destination choice, and the choice of destination could influence the choice factors through creating images of the destination in tourists’ mind. Tourist’s choice factors could be identified as the attributes which could describe a place as a tourist destination.(Heung & Quf, 2000) In addition to the destination selection, it also contains many aspects,