Research On The Image Of Shanghai Urban Toruism According To The Symbols Perception

With the further development of tourist destinations in china,the competition of tourist market is getting fierce in recent years. In order to attract tourists'attention and establish tourism brand, destination image building becomes one of the most important strategies which can help to enhance the competitive strength. For the reason that the pre-trip destination image may affect the motivation, moreover, the on-trip destination image may affect both the tourist destination assessing and revisit motivation, so how tourists percept the destination image is very important for image building and improving. From the angle of perception combined with semiotic theory, it can be discovered that the information tourists receive actually can be viewed as symbols in the process of perception. Destination image is like a set that all different kinds of symbols assemble together, and tourists can receive related information via perceiving those symbols while they visit the tourist destination.This paper chooses Shanghai as research object closely centering on"symbol",which searches for the kinds of symbols tourists perceive, route of transmission, perception tendency, etc during the course that tourists perceive the destination image. In addition this paper also analyzes how personal and media factors affect the kinds of symbols that tourists perceive, making great effort to figure out the appropriate ways to improve the image of Shanghai urban tourism.This paper is structurally divided into 6 parts.Part 1 is the introduction chapter, mainly talking about the background and significance of this research, besides that it also designs the research methods and ways on the basis of summarizing the relevant researches both on destination image and symbols in tourism.Part 2 is about related theory and analysis. It reanalyzes the process how tourists perceive destination image from the view of semiotic theory, and points out the possible influence during this process, then puts forward the research hypothesises and the ways to prove.Part 3 is analyzing the symbols of the image of Shanghai urban tourism. By summarizing and analyzing the development of Shanghai urban tourism in recent years,this chapter sums up the kinds of possible perceived symbols standing for both pre-trip and on-trip image ,which are used in the survey design in the following part.Part 4 is empirical research. Using the data from survey analysis to summarize the features how those symbols are perceived by tourists, this chapter makes empirical results that supported the hypothesis by detailed and exact cross-over analysis.Part 5 is analyzing the ways to improve the image of Shanghai urban tourism, according to the relevant analysis and conclusion made from the part4.Part 6 is about the limitations of this research and it also makes prospect for the future research.