Tourist Destination Schema: Definition And Measurement

As the tourism market becomes highly competitive,Destination Marketing Organizations are paying more attention to craft a successful destination image.Since the 1970s,destination image has become one of the most studied areas in tourism literature.The formation mechanism of destination image still is a difficult problem in tourism research.Existing research on tourists’ cognitive process of destination image remains underdeveloped,so it is necessary to draw lessons from the theory and methods of cognitive psychology to explore tourists’ cognitive structure.Based on the schema theory in cognitive psychology,this study proposes the concept of tourism destination schema.This study conceptualizes the tourism destination schema to build a conceptual model thereof.Drawing from semi-structured interviews and open-end surveys,the tourism destination schema of ancient capital cities is measured.The differences in content and structure of tourism destination schema and ancient capital tourism destination schema are compared by means of content analysis,diversity analysis,and social network analysis.Ultimately,this study uses the empirical method to explore the influence of the ancient capital tourism destination schema on tourists’ destination type judgment.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)Tourism destination schema is a cognitive structure formed by the refinement of the common characteristics of tourist destinations.This cognitive structure is the interrelated lexical network structure formed after the tourists have highly abstracted and refined the information of various destinations.Tourism destination schema is the template for the cognitive processing of tourism destination information.(2)The hierarchical structure of tourism destination schema comprises element,dimension,and unit,from low to high.The descriptive words from tourists about destination constitute the tourism destination schema elements.Tourism destination schema elements can be categorized into tourism resources,natural landscape,cultural and history,local food,entertainment,shopping,tourism environment,infrastructure,service management,and experience feeling.These dimensions constitute attraction resource,behavioral demand,support guarantee,and emotional experience.Different units and dimensions assume different roles in tourism destination schema and the correlation between them constitutes the tourist tourism destination schema structure network.The root cause of the individual differences in tourism destination schema is the result of the differences in its factors,dimensions,and units,and the relationships therebetween.(3)The ancient capital tourism destination schema refers to the cognitive structure formed by the refinement of the common characteristics of ancient capital destinations.Ancient capital tourism destination schema is a specific tourism destination schema,which is both consistent with and unique from the general tourism destination schema.In content,the word frequency distribution of ancient capital tourism destination schema and tourism destination schema is the same,but there are differences in vocabulary diversity between ancient capital tourism destination schema and tourism destination schema.In terms of the structure,both the dimensional structure and unit structure of the ancient capital tourism destination schema and tourism destination schema are same,whereas the structure of their elements is different.The ancient capital tourism destination schema’s elements are mostly distributed in the dimension of humanistic history and service management and form a more concentrated and distinctive cognitive structure.(4)Ancient capital tourism destination schema influences people’s judgments of the type of destination.Upon learning the ancient capital tourism destination schema,the tendency of people to determine the destination type was significantly enhanced and the duration of cognitive processing was significantly shortened.The cognitive characteristics of people in judging the type of tourist destination are also influenced by different ancient capital destination elements.The innovations of this paper are as follows.First,this study proposes the concept and measurement method of tourism destination schema.The content and structure of the tourism destination schema are measured to establish the conceptual structure model of the tourism destination schema.Second,the ancient capital schema is measured by using multivariate data and multivariate methods.The consistency and particularity of ancient capital tourism destination schema have been compared.This study also confirmed that the ancient capital tourism destination schema influences tourists’ destination type judgment.