Travel Decision-making Research Based On Expectancy Theory

Tourism industry as a component element of national economy has been playing an important role contributing to the economic growth.Since the Reform and Opening-up,the tourism industry has gained unprecedented development which powerfully promoted China's socialist modernization as industry margin and industry radius expanded constantly.The State Council issued the advice to speed up the development of tourism industry at the end of 2009 which clearly stated "to cultivate tourism industry into the strategic pillar industry of national economy and people's more satisfactory modern-service-industry."Tourism is a market-oriented industry and this market-oriented features become more and more prominent in the 21st century.Tourism has converted from an incomplete buyers'-market to a complete buyers'-market.This shift implies both challenges and opportunities for the tourism authorities,tourism suppliers and tourism destinations.To turn challenges into opportunities we need to have a bran-new understanding of tourists'traveling laws.Among those tourists'traveling laws, the tourists'decision-making rule without a doubt is the farthest one away from the tourist destination and the least controllable and most vulnerable one, at the same time the one which makes the greatest contribution to the tourism industry.So how to guide tourists to make the right decisions becomes an important issue to be solved of the tourism industry of 21st century.This article is the first try to analyze the tourists'decision-making process from the perspective of Expectancy Theory. Through comparing the tourists'decision-making process with the general staff motivation process we successfully captured the similarities and differences between the two and found a new solution to tourists'decision-making process.Around the "Perceived Environment" and its qualitative and quantitative characteristics,I initially built up the full expression of the "Tourist Stimulation" and redefined the tourists'decision-making process as the process of "tourists forming, weighing TSes of different potential destinations then making the final choice among them."I hope that this research could help those tourism researchers, tourism authorities, tourism suppliers rediscover the "Perceived Environment" and its structure, "Tourist Stimulation" and its constraints and work out reasonable publicizing and marketing strategies, and disseminate travel information through appropriate channels to arouse the tourists'desire of buying and consuming certain products. In addition, this is the first time that tourists'decision-making process is surveyed from the perspective of Expectancy Theory.By comparing the tourists'decision-making process with the general staff motivation process, we found that the time sequence and internal logic of the two are extremely parallel to each other, which constitutes the basis of applying Expectancy Theory to the research of tourists'decision-making process.This article reveals that "Perceived Environment" and its structure and " Tourist Stimulation " have a strong relational closeness,which is verified in the expression of "Tourist Stimulation".At this point,this study has a certain theoretical significance of enriching and improving the system of tourists'decision-making theory.