Comparative Studies On Intergenerational Difference Of Tourism Consumer Behavior

The financial crisis has a direct impact on China’s external demand which resulting in the declining exports and weakening investment in recent years. Under this condition, it’s of great significance to accelerate the development of tourism and it’s a long-term development task for all of us to fully release the potential of tourism consumption to maximize the social spending. However, the current Chinese tourism consumption space is mainly dependent on stimulating measures such as winter and summer vacation, the labor’s day and the national day which is obvious the positive factor for tourism industry. It’s not good news for the reason that it’s still hard to break the basic constraints of tourism market in increasing revenue, encouraging credit consumption and expected consumption in a short time. As a result, we need to broaden our mind to find a good way to develop the market and release the customers’potential. As we all know, china is in rapid transformation from traditional society to modern society with the characters of smaller family structure and growing aging population. It is right in this special period that rapid social change makes the multi-generational structure more prominent. Due to the obvious differences among customers of different generation in travel ideas, decisions and behaviors, we find a good research idea to explore the tourism products with the mean of distinguishing people by age. We deeply believe that it an innovative and unique perspective to introduce the intergenerational differences into tourism research for it’s easy to be utilized for us to deeply understand the ideological and cultural conflicts among generations.We mainly explore six basic questions in this paper based on a survey of tourism consumers in Shanghai. Firstly, do customers of different generation have preferences in choosing sources of tourism information? Secondly, do customers of different generation have similarities in travel experiences? Thirdly, do customers of different generation have preferences in choosing tourism destinations? Fourthly, do customers of different generations have similarities when assessing the tourism destination? Fifth, do customers of different generation have preferences in leisure activities? Finally, what should the tourism practitioners do in response to the results of the above problems? The paper is divided into six chapters.Chapter1introduced the background, study points, purpose, method, technical road-map and structure of paper.Chapter2listed intergenerational differences, tourism research using the intergenerational differences and the tourism customer behavior as the theoretical basis for empirical study. This part lays the foundation of the thesis, such as brings the research deficiencies and concludes the experiences from the previous research.Chapter3talks about the research model and listed the variables on the basis of chapter2. Then, the preparatory work of the empirical analysis will be presented in the paper including sample source, questionnaire design, data collection and statistical analysis, etc.Chapter4describes the statistics results and uses two test methods to verify and visualize the data we got.Chapter5makes a discussion to the statistical result on the basis of chapter4and then refines meaningful ideas for tourism marketing, then describing the theoretical contributions and implications of this study.Chapter6reviews and summarized the whole paper and points out the limitations and future research prospects of this study.To conclusion:customers of different generation show a significant split in thinking, decision-making and consumption behavior due to their birth-year. This phenomenon provides us an actionable analysis way for us to deeply understand the behaviors of tourism customers. Through the empirical survey, we make a conclusion that customers of different generations differ in choosing tourism information sources, travel experiences, travel destination preferences, evaluation criteria and leisure activities. It mainly reflects in three aspects:firstly, the red-year generation and people who were born after the foundation of the country show a stable and conservative consumer behavior when travelling. Secondly, people who were born before the opening reform policy and80’s are more mature in their tourism consumer behavior and express higher spiritual pursuits. Thirdly, the90’s exhibited the adventurous features and were the most potential generation in tourism market. Eventually, we present recommendations available for domestic tourism practitioners based on the results.