The Empirical Research On The Factors That Influence Tourists' Destination Choice

With the high-speed development of the science and technology, the range of tourists'destination choice has been greatly enlarged, even regardless of the time and space. Thus, the vacation destinations, as suppliers of tourism products, have to survive in the market that's full of intense competitions. This paper tries to classify the factors that affect tourists'destination choice as well as test the degree of their influence based on the previous research, on purpose of providing some new theoretical basis to help the destinations and tourism enterprises gain advantages in the competition via effective marketing.This paper analyzes the main factors that influence tourists'destination choice, including inhibited factors, motivation, traveling experiences, destination attractiveness, social influence and contextual factors according to related theories and researches. Through the combination with the analysis on tourists'destination selection process, the paper also gives some perspectives on the system which can demonstrate how the factors influence tourists'destination choice and offers the theoretical model about the system. In line with the analysis, the paper puts forward some theoretical hypotheses on the factors.According to the data gained vie the survey, the paper has reached some conclusions with the outcome of the statistical analysis as follows: (1) the factors that affect tourists'destination choice can be classified into 7 categories. They are the destination attractiveness, the cognition of the destination, the safety and contextual factors, social influence, motivation and traveling experience, personal economic factors, the traveling supporting factors of the destination. (2) the destination attractiveness can be classified into 5 categories. They are service attractiveness, culture and life attractiveness, activity attractiveness, atmosphere attractiveness, landscape attractiveness. The degree of the importance of each kind of factors toward tourists when they select a vacation destination is positively related to the degree of the influence of that kind of factors. (3) the level of the tourists'income and spare time have negative relationship with the degree of their influence toward tourists as to vacation destination choice. (4) tourists'cognition toward destinations is mainly through ways of relatives and friends, magazines and TV columns on traveling, advertisements, all kinds of literary works, tourism pamphlets, traveling web sites,...