Chinese Tourist’s Loyalty And The Travel Behavior Toward Thailand As A Tourism Destination

With the development of the economic globalization, tourism Industry is highly expanding and making an enormous contribution to the economy of country. Recently, China becomes the potential market for the world tourism industry. To enhance capabilities of competitiveness in tourism industry, understanding on Chinese tourists’behavior is one of crucial key.The purpose of this research is fourfold; To begin with I) to determine characteristic of Chinese tourists who are traveling to Thailand in term of demographic and psychographic; 2) to determine Chinese tourist’s travel behavior; 3) to explore the antecedents of Chinese tourist’s loyalty toward Thailand and 4) to explore the antecedents of Chinese tourist’s intention to revisit Thailand.For this purpose, the researcher employs the consumer behavior theory and loyalty theory as the principle of this study. Questionnaire is an instrument for collecting data. The samples size of this study are 400 of Chinese tourists who traveling to Thailand. Next, Data are analyzed by descriptive statistics, inferential statistics and multiple regressions and using SPSS program.According to this research, the results show that majority of Chinese tourist are aged 31-35 years old (21%), married (62.91%), having one children living with them (43.26%), household income ranging between 9,000-11,999 RMB (21.21%) Most of them come from Guangdong province (18.30%),22% of them have been travel to Thailand before. The top channel of information about Thailand is friends (33.77%). The most interesting product for Chinese tourist is the beach. The most spending item in Thailand was shopping (26.32%) with the travel expense per trip in range of 4,000-7,999 RMB (39.2%) and length of stay in range of 7-14 days (56.85%). The most motivation factor that pushes them to travel is 1) Desire to seek novelty and status; 2) Desire to experience different lifestyles and people and 3) Desire to strengthen family or kinship ties.For male tourists, the top three keys of attitudinal loyalty are attachment, push motivation in dimension of "food and people" and satisfaction. Whereas the top three keys of attitudinal loyalty for female are perceive value, attachment and satisfaction.To summarize, attachment, perceive value and satisfactions are the top three crucial keys of attitudinal loyalty. To maintain Chinese tourists’loyalty and intention to revisit Thailand, the tourism marketer, entrepreneur and TAT should focus on developing the strategy strengthen to attached by establishing the activities and events involving with local culture, local life style for Chinese tourists. Next, to maintain perceive value, the entrepreneur should provide the reasonable costs of travel products such as, accommodation, transportation cost, food cost; also need to develop transportation infrastructure. Lastly, to boost up the satisfaction of Chinese tourists, tourism marketing, TAT should maintain a high standard on service quality, suitable promotion campaign; also protect the tourism natural sources in country to support the increasing amount of tourists in the near future.This thesis consists of 7 chapters:Chapterl is an introduction of Thailand tourism background and literature review on (1) relationship between Thai and China in tourism perspective; (2) Study on how travel behavior and loyalty destination impact tourism businessChapter2 reviews on Theory and theoretical perspectives supported and related to this thesis including Consumer behavior, loyalty in tourism perspective, intention to revisit destination, satisfaction, perceive value, attachment, motivation, novelty seeking.Chapter3 focuses on Thailand tourism Current situation and conditions of Chinese tourists. Chapter4:focuses on detailed discussions of the research methodology including researchdesign, population Sampling, data collection, data instrument, analysis approach and summary all variables used in this study.Chapter5:evaluates an analysis of Chinese tourists in Thailand including psychographic Characteristic of Chinese tourists in Thailand and their travel Behavior.Chapter6:evaluates an analysis of antecedent toward Destination loyalty and intention to revisit Thailand. In this chapter model of multiple regression will be accessed for analysis the relationship between variables.Chapter7:discusses the conclusion in which the researcher would emphasize the important data and provide the recommendation to tourism marketer, government, and entrepreneur. Also limitation of this thesis and recommendation to future research are provided in this chapter.