A Study On Semiotics Of Tourist Experience

The essence of tour is tourist experience that has not been given enough attention to by Chinese scholars up to now. Therefore, this paper is devoted to the study of tourist experience from a totally new point of view of semiotics in order to find some fundamentals in tourist experience. This paper summarizes the literatures on tourist experience and tourism semiotics and we can find that semiotics of tourism has not been fully probed into in oversea academia; while, in China there is few literatures on tourism semiotics. Undoubtedly, studying signs and how symbols are read in tourist experience can make an innovating contribution to tourism theory studies. Tourist experience is essentially a process of symbolization activity. It can be concluded that tourist world is a world filled with all kinds of symbols; therefore, the tourists encounter a lot of symbols on his/her trip. We can make an important conclusion that tourists' reading the symbols is the leading activity in tourist experience and also the basic means.This paper, taking Xixi Wetland as an example, tries to explain our tourist experience from the interpretation and construction of semiotic. Based on literature analysis and field research, the study analyzes semiotic perception of tourists' motivation, symbol interpretation in tourist experience and the construction of symbol system in experience quality using correlation analysis, hierarchical clustering and other methods. The results indicate that:leisure and romance are the basic perception of tourists'motivation towards Xixi Wetland. Travelers of diverse symbol types are structurally different in aspects of social attributes and the travel behavior, thus their travel quality varies much more. In combination with analysis of semiotic factors to experience quantity, a new theoretical vision to study the nature of travel experience is provided, and an effective way to enrich and strengthen the travel experience is offered as well. The last section is the conclusion of the dissertation. It reviews the main ideas in the paper, gives some suggestions on related studies in future and again points out the value of studying tourist experience from the point of view of semiotics. Therefore, the paper urges that more researchers should shift their attentions to these two areas of tourism study.