A Study On The Curve Of Tourist Psychological Capacity In Theme Park

The different paths which Chinese and foreign park operators take in developing theme park have aroused heated discussion on "Development Paradox" in China theme park industry,and also lead to the topic on inner management functions among governments,academia and enterprises.Combining theoretical research and firsthand experiences in theme parks,this paper digs into the operational and managerial problems and finds out that"paradox"could be broken through only by researching the problems from the visitor's perspective based on the tourist capacity theory.Therefore, psychological capacity(PC) is introduced to the management of theme parks.Taken Happy Valley as an example,this paper conducts model constructing, hypothesis researching,model validating and hypothesis testing,and brings out conclusions as follows:1)Tourist psychological capacity curve could be shaped as inverted-U.2)Both agglomeration and the image of city are proved to be the macro factors of psychological capacity.3)The PC in high season is notably the highest than other times,while in low season the lowest.4)A higher level of satisfaction has been found in the juvenile,and the old people are revealed with a relatively lower PC, however,both the two groups are with high tolerance interval according to the increase of visitors.5)Female shows lower PC than male and emotionally more venerate to visitor increase;6)PC negatively correlates with the level of education; 7)It indicates a reasonable managing state of the theme park when the PC above the threshold,while a below case suggests problems.Based on these conclusions,this paper brings out much more PC-based managerial technologies,including visitor distribution and guidance,selection and isolation,queue techniques etc,which contributes not only to science-sounding approaches of visitor management,but also to Tourist Capacity theory itself.