Empirical Study: Characteristics Of Outbound Tourist In Shanghai

World Tourism Organization forecast that by 2015 China will become the world's fourth largest outbound tourist country. Our country's outbound tourism is not a long tine of development. The strategy of outbound tourism has three steps, from the appropriate developing policy to regulate developing, and now the policy is orderly developing. We can say that the revised policies are helpful to the development of outbound tourism. Although we are facing the global grave economic crisis, China's outbound tourism is still in the stage of growth. In the first quarter of 2009 the number of outbound tourist is 11.97 million, an increase of 4.9% compared with the time of last year. Thanks to the continued development of China's economy, the steady growth of national income, leisure time and the improved of the quality of life, people's demand for outbound travel will continue to increase and the outbound tourism market will be bigger and bigger. In order to adapt to the growing outbound tourism market, and to guide the healthy development of outbound tourism, scholars concern the outbound tourism more and more, and the scope of the study wider and wider. The contents include changes of outbound travel policy, the existing problems, trends and counter measures, the characteristics of outbound travel market, consumer behavior, and case study of outbound tourism from home and abroad, and so on.Based on lots of literature and the related statistics, and having more knowledge of the situation of China and Shanghai's outbound tourism market as well as the general characteristics of tourism consumers, and according to the market segmentation theory and consumer behavior theory, this dissertation addresses the methodology of this article with research ideas. First of all, sort out the current situation of our country's outbound tourism market and review the course of development of outbound tourism. Secondly, give an overview of literature of China's outbound tourism. And then, make a clear analysis of the characteristics of shanghai outbound tourists according to the first-hand information of a questionnaire survey. That is the characteristics of vital statistics, tourism decision-making, tourism consumer characteristics and the expectation of tourism. Finally, take some measures of the development of Shanghai outbound tourism according to the research conclusions.There are still some limitation and shortage in this dissertation, such as the lack of links research among characteristics of shanghai outbound tourist, under-representation of the survey data, the number of samples not big and the scope of research not wide. This study focuses on the characteristics of tourism decision-making while only a small portion of the travel experiences and feelings. With the shanghai outbound travel market growing gradually and the number of outbound tourists increasing, therefore it recommended that the content and direction of future research can be focus on the outbound tourist experience of the tour route and tourism product, the quality of tourism services and the tourist satisfaction.