Spatial Interdependency Of Tourist Attractions

Tourist attractions are the core elements of tourism industry and the first power for regional tourism development.In recent years,with the rapid growth in China' s tourism,tourist attractions have been continuously exploited and established.Confronted with the increasingly fierce competition,how should tourist attractions get along with each other?This is an urgent issue needed to be solved by the official tourism organizations and tourist attraction managers.Employing monthly panel data of 75 tourist attractions in Guangdong Province,China from 2007 to 2009,this study adopts dynamic spatial econometric method to estimate the spatial links between tourist attractions.Besides,based on the cumulative attraction theory,this study classifies 75 tourist attractions into natural attractions,cultural attractions and manmade attractions,and investigates how similarity affects the spatial relationship between tourist attractions.Additionally,based on the core-periphery theory,this study divides 75 tourist attractions into primary attractions and secondary attractions,and explores the spatial relation among primary attractions,among secondary attractions,as well as between primary attractions and secondary attractions.The findings are as follows:(1)On the whole,there exists positive spatial relation between tourist attractions.In other words,the multi-attraction trips are significant in Guangdong Province;(2)In terms of different types of tourist attractions,the impact of similarity on the spatial relationship varies.Specifically,there exists competition effect among natural attractions.There exists complementary effect among cultural attractions.There exists competition effect among manmade attractions.(3)With regard to tourist attractions with different degrees of market power,there is also difference in the spatial linkage.There is complementary effect among primary attractions.There is competition effect among secondary attractions.Primary attractions have spillover effect on secondary attractions in terms of tourist flows.Secondary attractions does not.exert a significant influence on primary attractions.This study makes contributions in the following aspects.First,the existing literature regarding multi-destination trips focuses on the macro level such as countries and cities.Differently,this study applies the multi-destination trip to the micro level,i.e.tourist attractions.Second,regarding the application of core-periphery theory in tourism field,researchers only pay attention to the impact of the core area on the periphery area.This study enriches the core-periphery theory by investigating the relationship among core areas and among periphery areas.Third,the extant research ignores the heterogeneity of spatial interdependency of tourist attractions.This study untangles the complex relationships by examining how type and market power affect the spatial relationship of attractions.Fourth,this study makes improvements on the methodology in two respects.For one thing,previous scholars utilize questionnaires or interviews to explore this issue and their conclusions are difficult to generalize due to the small-scale data.This study employs spatial econometric techniques and large-scale data to verify their findings.For another,researchers in tourism field prefer to use static spatial econometric method and thus neglect the persistence of tourism demand.This study takes advantage of dynamic spatial econometric method and makes progress in the methodology.