Crowding Perceptions And Tourist Experience Of Mountain Resorts

Tourism is developing rapidly in China.With the tourism industry becoming a global economic development momentum of the most powerful and largest one of a sunrise industry,a lot of problems arise as well.Congestion,one of the common phenomena appear in scenic spots,is a serious problem that hold the development of the tourism industry.There is a relatively long history of concern over the effect of increasing use on the quality of the recreation experience.Shortly after the beginning of the period of rapidly expanding outdoor recreation in the 1950s and 1960s,a number of popular articles began to generate widespread interest in this topic.Plenty of work has been done to explore the explanation to tourist perception of crowding,factors affecting crowding perception,tourist coping behaviors,and the effect of crowding perception on tourist satisfaction.This article reviews the related literature and summarizes the factors that may influence tourist crowding perception.Few articles on crowding explores the psychological dimensions of human crowding perceptions.The result of self-reported crowding perception showed that the internal consistency can't be ensured.A comment on the studies about tourist crowding perception and tourist satisfaction is made.The negative effect of perceived crowding on satisfaction was denied by most empirical studies.Satisfaction as the only index to measure the effect of tourist crowding perception on the quality of experience is inappropriate since tourists may adopt a variety of coping mechanisms to combat perceived crowding and to maintain a high degree of satisfaction.Based on social interference and stimulus overload theories,we propose the two dimensions of perceived crowding by tourist of mountain resorts according to the dimensions of human perceived crowding proposed by StokolsC 1976).The characters of tourist encounters of transient and anonymity are taken into consideration to distinguish perceived crowding by tourists to that of daily life.The two dimensions of perceived crowding by tourist of mountain resorts are physical crowding perception and social crowding perception.A case study of World heritage Mount Sanqingshan is taken during June 2013.The measurement indicators for both dimensions are proposed and testified in the field study.The influence of personal characteristics of visitors and characteristics of those encountered on dimensions of tourist crowding perceptions are tested.Tourist perceived attractiveness is introduced as a mediator variable to test the influence of tourist perceived crowding on satisfaction.The main conclusions are as following:(1)Crowding perceived by tourist of mountain resorts fill into two dimensions:physical crowding and social crowding.Whereas in physical crowding a violation of spatial expectations relates primarily to the physical dimensions of the environment which manifests as thwarting use of tourism resources or public facilities;social crowding thwarts expectations concerning the adequacy of the social environment which mostly appears when the present of other tourist causes conflicts or unpleasant experience.(2)Personal characteristics of visitors,characteristics of those encountered and situational factors may influence tourist crowding perceptions.The first two kind of elements are tested in the empirical study in this paper.Age,sex,and education level are reported to have significant influence on tourist perceived crowding.Respondents who are male or older tend to have high perception on social crowding;better educated respondents seem to have lower physical crowding perception.The different dimensions of tourist motivation and place attachment have different influence on crowding perceptions.Social motivation of tourist can ease social crowding perception,while no effect from non-social motivation isn't confirmed.Tourists with high place identity tend to have low social crowding perception;while those with high place dependence perceive high social crowding perception.While encounters with other tourists' misbehaviors are the most important factor that effects both dimensions of crowding perceptions,the factors mainly effect on social dimension of tourist crowding perceptions in general.(3)Perceived attractiveness is introduced to evaluate the relationship between crowding perceptions and tourist satisfaction.The result of SEM indicate that tourist physical crowding perception has a direct negative effeect on satisfaction.Tourist social crowding perception has a negative effect on perceived attractiveness,while the effect on satisfaction is not significant.Since perceived attractiveness is an important factor directly influencing satisfaction,it acts as an intermediary in the effect of social crowding perception on satisfaction.Moreover,satisfaction i5 not appropriate to be taken as the only dimension to measure the quality of tourist experience since high level of satisfaction doesn't guarantee high quality of the experience.Perceived attractiveness is also an integral part to measure tourist experience quality in a mountain resorts,and tourist crowding perceptions have negative effects on both perceived attractiveness and tourist satisfaction.The above result indicates that the empirical study shows that crowding perceptions have a statistical significant negative effect on tourist experience.