A Study On The Types Of Tourists And Comparison Of Travel Behavior At Religious Tourism Destination

As one of the oldest forms of tourism, religious tourism is the combination ofreligious belief and religious culture, sanctification and secularization. In the socialenvironment full of materialistic desire and increasingly fierce competition, it is acommon choice for religious believers and ordinary tourists to go to religious tourismdestination to get relaxed, purify the mind and show religious worship. With the fastdevelopment of religious tourism, there are many problems and contradictionsexisting in religious tourism destinations in our country, such as single touristproducts, conflicts between tourists and Buddhist pilgrims, loss of religiousatmosphere, etc. One of the important reasons is that we don’t have an in-depthunderstanding of travel behavior of different market segment. Through reviewing therelated research at home and abroad on religious tourists, we found that foreignscholars focused on micro research content such as tourist motivation, behavioralpreference and classification of tourists, etc. However, domestic scholars focused ontourist motivation, spatial behavior pattern and basic travel behavior, etc. There are afew articles carried on researches on classification of religious tourists. Based on thesummary of characteristics of religious tourism destination and religious tourists, thispaper takes Jiuhua Mountain as an example to do the research by using questionnairesurvey. Descriptive Statistics, Factor Analysis, Cluster Analysis, Variance Analysisand other mathematical methods are adopted to discuss religious tourist motivationand travel behavior. This paper classifies the religious tourists based on touristmotivations, and then makes a comparison of different travel behaviors of differenttypes of tourists. At last, the paper puts forward some countermeasures to marketdevelopment and management of religious tourism destination.Through the survey of Buddhist tourist destination of Jiuhua Mountain, thispaper draws the following conclusions:firstly, the tourist motivations of religioustourists in Jiuhua Mountain include spiritual inspiration, cultural experience, prayerand fulfillment, sightseeing and leisure, environmental implication, among whichsightseeing and leisure, cultural experience are the main motivations, and environmental implication is the weakest. Secondly, religious tourists can beclassified into three categories, namely, Sightseeing and recreational tourist,multipurpose tourist, religious experienced tourist. Thirdly, there are significantdifferences among three types of religious tourists in the demographic characteristics,travel motivations, the basic behavior of tourism, tourist consumption behavior,preference of religious tourism resources and tourism experience. Sightseeingrecreational tourists tend to seek different experience and get complete relaxation,whose tourist behavior has no much difference with tourists of general tourismdestination. Multipurpose tourists travel to religious tourism destination with clearpurposes. They are not only active participants of religious tourism activities, but alsoshow similar travel behaviors with sightseeing recreational tourists. Most of religiousexperienced tourists are Buddhist believers. In the pursuit of spiritual experience fromreligious tourism, they show strong religious emotion in all sorts of religious travelbehaviors.