Study On The Factors Influencing The Choice Of Intra-provincial Travel Destinations For Tourists In Hunan Province In The Light Of HSR Effects

The opening of high-speed rails(HSR)exerts a significant "space-time compression" effect to the source-destination spatial distance,which alleviates the traffic restrictions of tourists to a certain extent.Tourists’ selection between destinations is influenced by many factors,for instance,personal features,destination attributes and travel features.While HSR improves the accessibility,the imbalance of tourism development among regions will be deepened as the imbalance of regional development increasingly serious.Tourist destination choice behavior has important reference value for tourism marketing.Therefore,deeply exploring tourists’ preference for tourism destinations in the light of HSR effects is of great significance to the urban tourism planning,marketing,management and sustainable development of Hunan Province.Previous studies have mostly focused on how the opening of HSR changes the spatial structure of tourist flow in cities along the route,and pays attention to a series of effects of high-speed rail on tourism,failing to measure the action of multiple factors or capture the group differences in the preference for destinations under the effects of HSR.Based on it,this paper takes Xiangtan and Yueyang as typical cases of the diffusion effect and the corridor effect of HSR.Firstly,the main factors affecting destination choice were identified,and the attribute levels were configured,forming multiple virtual alternatives.Next,questionnaire surveys were carried out to collect tourists’ selections between each pair of alternatives.Further,a discrete choice model was constructed to assign a weight to each factor,reflecting its importance to tourists’ decision-making regarding their destination selection and to disclose the law of tourists’ preferences for destinations.Tourists’ willingness to pay of various attributes is calculated to measure express in monetary units the changes productid in the utility as a result of the changes in the attributes.At last,the study proposes reasonable recommendations based on the current situation.The results show:(1)The abundance of tourism resources,tourism popularity,tourism reputation,hotel catering facilities,entry time and connection time significantly affect the choice of tourism destinations in Hunan Province.There is different in importance between factors under different HSR effects.Under the HSR corridor effect,the top three factors affecting tourists’ preference for destinations in Yueyang are tourism resource abundance,hotel catering reputation;under the HSR diffusion effect,the top three factors affecting tourists’ preference for destinations in Xiangtan are connection time,entry time and popularity.(2)In the context of HSR,the comparative advantage of urban tourism is an important impactor in tourists’ destination selection.(3)Tourists’ selection between destinations could be affected by personal features.In terms of age,tourists aged 26-45 pay more attention to hotel catering facilities than the other two groups;in terms of education level,higher educated tourists attach more importance to traffic conditions than lower educated tourists.(4)Tourists’ willingness to pay of various attributes is dissimilar.For tourists in Yueyang,the willingness to pay for tourism resource abundance is the highest,and the connection time is the lowest;for tourists in Xiangtan,the "willingness to pay " for connection time is the highest,and the tourism resource abundance is the lowest.