Travel Experience

In the last 30 years in the 20^th century, tourist experience study has emerged as an important and serious field of research in the western academic society. Contrastively, this topic has gained the gaze of scholars since the recent years in China, and the trend has showed a promising future so as to position the conception of tourist experience as the core concept of tourism study. This paper is devoted to explore some fundamentals of tourist experience study, and intentionally efforts has been made to the construction of theory in the field of tourist experience.The main frame of this study is organized as the following:Firstly, we discuss the phenomenological base for the study of tourist experience: the theoretical approaches of constructing the phenomenological world of tourist experience. The outcome of this theoretical effort is the model of tourist world that is a counterpart of the so-called life world or life space. Tourism world encompass a set of conceptions like tourist situations, tourist field, tourist settings, etc., which server as the important process of conceptualization for tourist experience studies.Secondly, the study is devoted to probe the ladder of motives of tourist behaviors. We featured the study with a comprehensive and hierarchy model of tourist motives, which repositions the traditional paradigms of tourist motives that we critiques after a careful going through the literatures. Based on the established model, some important conclusions are reached relevant to the intrinsic motives of tourist behavior, tourist needs, and tourist motivations.Thirdly, we make some efforts to probe the mechanism of pleasure resulted from the process of tourist experience. We see this mechanism as a complicated emotional and cognitive process that rewards tourists with the "tourist pleasure" in the emotional and mental sense. A new typology of tourist experience helps the author in probing the structure of tourist experience in detail, and contributes to the...