A Study About The Impact Of Other Customer Perception Towards Perceived Value Of Cruise Tourists

As a kind of high-end leisure tourism,cruise tourism comes to China not for long but it gains much attention for developing too fast.However,there are some problems with high speed developing.This research focuses on one of the problems which is that the middle aged and elderly people,as the main target market of cruise tourism in China,have some unsuitable behaviors.These behaviors could have bad influence on other customers in the same cruise.This research hopes to make the mechanism inside clear.Based on the literature review about perceived value,cruise image,tourist expectation,other customer perception and also some related theories,this study builds the theoretical model of those four constructs.Through analyzing the data from the cruise tourists,this study confirms that two dimensions of other customer perception including appearance and suitable behaviors affect cruise image positively but similarity is not proved to affect cruise image.The result also shows that tourists expectation negatively affects cruise image.At the same time,cruise image plays partial mediation function between the relationship of other customers' suitable behaviors and perceived value and the relationship of tourist expectation and perceived value.In terms of the contributions this study has,firstly this research builds the theory model between other customer perception,tourist expectation,cruise image and perceived value and reveals their internal connections.Also,this study offers some practical advices to the cruise companies about how to improve the product and service qualities based on the study conclusions.