Research On The Development Of Chinese Tourist Market In Phuket, Thailand

Recently, with the rapid increasing of economic and the improvement living standard of the people, tourism compared with previous years has made a significant development. People pay more attention to the comfort brought by traveling every year. Therefore, traveling becomes one of the main way to go on holidays. Thailand, as a world famous tourist country in southeast Asia, attracts countless tourists to sightseeing trips. Tourism starts early in Thailand, which has occupied an important position in the economy of Thailand.Phuket island, located in the south coast, is the biggest island in Thailand. As one of the important scenic spots, Phuket island is called “The pearl of the Andaman Sea”, and is also the resort of the Southeast Asia and world tropical seaside tourism. It receives over 6 million person times per year and more than 100 billion THB foreign currency earnings, which is one of the significant support scenic spots. According to the forecast analysis of the world economic development tendency, the world tourism will transform to a unified market, then there will be no national borders of world travel. The competitiveness of tourist industry will be internationalization. Southeast Asia countries plan to set up “ASEAN Community” in 2015, a governmental organization which includes majority countries in Southeast Asia. That way, the cooperation of ASEAN countries will be strengthened. The district cooperative tourism will bring new opportunities and challenges to Phuket island.The thesis select Phuket island as the research object. According to the SWOT analysis, the paper gives a systematic analysis of Phuket island through superiority, weakness, opportunity and threats currently. By analyzing the travel demographics and travel behavior of Chinese tourists to analyze their conditions of demand, in order to explore the development potential and market position of coastal island tourism of Phuket island. Finally, the paper gives policy proposal of the whole development route in Phuket island attempting to attract more Chinese tourists.