Research On The Relationship Between Customer Participation,Trust And Loyalty Of Folk Tourism In Lhasa

The folk tourism, a high-level tourism being intimately bound up with geographical and cultural connotation, is a process of cultural consumption as tourists are attracted by the local unique characteristics and intense interracial culture in certain regions. As a city with abundant resources of folklore tourism, Lhasa attaches great importance to the development of folk tourism with continually increasing financial investment toward tourism, in order to build an international tourism city with plateau and national characteristics.According to statistics from Lhasa Tourism Bureau, by the end of October20,2012, Lhasa had accumulatively received6.19million visitors at home and abroad, and the tourism revenue had reached6.008billion Yuan. Undoubtedly, as a mainstay of the economic development of Lhasa, it is with great potential. However, there still exists some space for improvement. In this background, it’s urgent to solve the problem that how to improve tourist’loyalty. Therefore, that study of the customer loyalty in folk tourism in Lhasa is of great practical significance.From previous literatures, we can conclude that most researches of tourism loyalty were done mainly through measuring attitude and behavior which involves the impact on loyalty of motivation service quality, satisfaction. In contrast, little attention has been paid to the study of how customer participation and trust affect the loyalty.Hence, that research model of Customer participation-Customer trust Customer loyalty was set up to explore the effects of customer participation on customer loyalty. Besides, author also designed questionnaire by referring to relevant information, and issued in Lhasa folk tourism spots, such as the Potala Palace, Jokhang Temple, Barkhor Street. The questionnaires were issued in the way of combination of random intercept and cooperation with the tourism service agencies and168valid questionnaires were finally obtained. After the inspection of the reliability and validity of the questionnaire, the data were analyzed by SPSS17.0software.Our assumption has been basically verified by a series of data analysis. First of all, in the relationship between the three dimensions of customer participation and customer trust, information sharing only embodies the significant relationship with cognitive trust. In addition, responsible behavior and social interaction are only significantly relating to emotional trust.This result is consistent with the definitions of customer participation dimension and trust. Secondly, from the relationship between customer participation and customer loyalty, we find that information sharing, responsible behavior and social interaction are positively correlated with customer loyalty respectively. Simultaneously, we verify that the customer trust plays an intermediary role between customer participation and customer. Specifically speaking, it’s cognitive trust that acts as a medium between information sharing and customer loyalty and emotional trust in responsible behavior, social interaction and customer loyalty. Finally, we come to that customer trust and customer loyalty are also positively correlated. And comparing to cognitive trust, emotional trust is more likely to bread customer loyalty.Our study conclusion provides reference for Lhasa folk tourism. In order to build and maintain customer loyalty, more attention should be paid on improving the customer’s emotional trust. Furthermore, as emotional trust is triggered by responsible behavior and social interaction, tourism service providers should strive to guide customers to improve their responsible behavior and social interaction, in order to build emotional trust of customers and consequently increases the customer loyalty.