Tourists Perceptual Image On Historic Areas In Modern Cities

Cultural tourism develops fast in recent years with significance already shown in tourism industry, and tourist experience model in cultural tourism is a spotted area in academia. As a typical source of cultural tourism product in cities, the development of urban historic areas runs to problems like balance protection/development, sustaining authenticity and impart the value of local culture, these may all effect the "message" tourists receive. Therefore we need to know how people perceive this kind of tourism attraction and in what ways do they better understand local culture and enhance experience.This article depicts and details in the process tourist perceive urban historic areas. Basing on cognitive-affective theory and previous study on scales, a perceptual image formation model is proposed and evidenced in a case study of Back Sea historic area. Besides the model, the article also explores the effect of tourist features, such like motives and experience, on perceptual image, while information source is proved less effective to image evaluation.The structured analysis suggest that tourists cognitive image on urban historic areas are focused on cultural authenticity, visual authenticity, tourism service and social environment. Motive and demographic features will bring changes to both affective and cognitive image. Combining g with unstructured study, the article finds the cultural image perceived by different segments are deviated and differentiated, and suggests key messages should be delivered in communication to better influence.