A Study Of Factors To Cruise Tourism And Its Implication For China

Cruise tourism's good momentum and its huge industry role in promoting, has great appeal for China. With China's rapid economic development, a general increase in national income, consumer preferences have been turning to high-lever travel products and cruise travel demand expands. Cruise is at the mature stage in North America and Europe, and gradually from the upper class's specific into a middle-class's mass tourism. Increasing in new ships and cruising products lead to market segmentation and competition growing in intensity, cruise market and destination gradually moving to the Orient, which brings opportunities for China's cruise tourism. Coastal provinces in China show great interest to the cruise market this "big cake".They put the construction of Homeport and Callport in the planning agenda one and another, then their competition intensified.Based on background research and literature review, the paper presents the research framework, summarizes characteristics of cruise tourism in the development process at home and abroad, further defines the concept of cruise, cruise tourism, cruise industry, cruise terminal, cruise liner. This paper regards the cruise tourism as a system, to study how the various factors consititute the system and optimize the development of cruise tourism. The author collected recent cruise tourism-related data of North America and Europe in years, making a preliminary analysis of each factor of cruise tourism from the perspective of tourism, travel object and media. Based on the analysis,the authoner brings forward a set of index system of the cruise tourism, using Analytic Hierarchy Process,Delphi and software MCE v1.O as tool.Finally, the paper explains the connotation of the index system. Among the three facors, tourists impact most, followed by tourism object, and finally the travel media. Under the guidance of the index system and combined with the actual situation in China, such as cruise market, travel resources and cruise enterprises, a series proposals in favor of domestic cruise tourism have been put forward.