A Research On Destination's Influences To Tourists: From Sociological Perspective

Currently, we can see tourists around the whole world. The word,"tourist", could be seen as a substitute for"modern"now. In tourism's development, tourists are at its centre and influence the tourism destinations a lot. Because of their significance, tourists are getting more and more attention from the governments and academics. Many scholars have done research on tourists'motivations, tourist behaviors, the relationship between residents and tourists from different perspectives. The existing research leads us to understand the characteristics of tourists more definitely. However, only a few scholars have explored tourist behavior from the perspective of destinations. And moreover, there is nearly no people having carried research on tourist behavior from destinations'perspective in the background of sociology. So, the study here intends to involve both perspectives of sociology and destinations to understand tourist behaviors.In the Introduction section, the existing research about destinations and tourists'behaviors is presented, following by some sociological knowledge.Chapter1 mainly introduces some theories which will be used later, including Cohen's tourist typology & modes of tourist behavior, Jafari's tourist model, and Turner's"Centre out there". As the basis of this paper, the introduction here makes the readers understand tourists and their behavior better.Chapter2 mainly analyses the destination system and then classifies destinations into 18 types. The system includes three aspects: tourism resources, tourism development in destinations and the outside environment there, containing the politics, economy, society, culture, religion and etc. It uses two dimensions to classify the destinations: the characteristics of local tourism resources and the availability. The word"availability"nearly involves all aspects except tourism resources mentioned above. To integrate all these aspects into one dimension will helps us to construct a relative simple model of destinations.In Chapter3, tourist behaviors are discussed according to the classification in Chapter2. Jafari's tourist model is used here. Tourists'behaviors and the social influences coming from destinations to tourists will be mainly discussed. Finally, in Chapter4, the author chooses 4 destinations in Jilin province to make a discussion.