A Study On Chongqing Public's Perception Of The World Expo Tourist Image And Tourism Intention

2010 World Expo will lead a new leap of tourism industry in Shanghai. Over 70 million target tourist will bring tremendous challenges to Shanghai tourism industry, and how to attract long-distant tourist to increase the number of tourist is also a major challenge. Tourism image can affect tourist's subjective understanding and tourism behavior. Western citizen and eastern citizen may have different awareness about 2010 World Expo because of distance and publicity.In order to attract sufficient number of people in Chongqing and western regions public participation in the 2010 World Expo, the Expo Organizing Committee must first understand the tourism image of Expo in the minds of potential tourists, then can make effective market positioning and marketing in order to establish or even change the tourism image of Expo in the minds of potential tourists, ultimately attract more tourists to participate in the Expo. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the tourism image of Expo and understand their formation from the deep level, then the Expo Organizing Committee can develop effective strategies to promote World Expo.On the basis of the literature research of tourism image and tourism intention,this paper puts forward 9 hypothesis, takes a questionnaire survey to investigate the World Expo tourism image and tourism intention of Chongqing citizen, using SPSS 13.0 and AMOS 7.0 software for data processing and analysis. The main analysis methods are mainfactor analysis, variance analysis and structural equation model and so on. The major conclusions are summarized as follows:First, the evaluations of Chongqin public about the cognitive and emotional image of the World Expo are positive, the Expo cognitive image include three dimensions:"the World Expo venues attractive", "World Expo facilities" and "social environment and values ". From the result of open-ended questions, the Chongqing citizen think that "gourmet snacks", "business / trade", " inhospitality " and "noisy / more people" are also the image of the World Expo.Second, demographic factors have a certain impact on the tourism image and intention of the World Expo. There are great differences on education level for the three dimensions of cognitive, emotional image and tourism intention of the World Expo, gender and revenue have smaller impact.Third, there is no significant relationship between tourism motivation and emotion image, tourism intention by the structural equation model. The cognitive image and emotional image of the World Expo have a direct impact on tourism intention, and the World Expo cognitive image and the familiarity of the Expo are the key factor.Finally, based on empirical findings of the study, this paper put forward some suggestions in order to make market positioning and marketing of World Expo tourism.