Ice-snow Tourism Destination Choice And Management Strategy Simulation:A New Perspective Of Embodied Cognition Theory

During the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games,the number of tourists who have experienced ice-snow tourism has grown significantly in China.However,80% of the icesnow tourism destinations do not provide high-quality ice-snow tourism programs and the fading effect of the Olympic Winter Games lead to about 80% of the leisure tourists may not choose to visit ice-snow tourism destinations again.Therefore,how to continue the popularity of ice-snow tourism has received widespread concern.Previous studies on tourists’ destination choices are mostly explained from the perspectives of situational cognition,emotional evaluation and psychological perception,which have a limitation of insufficient attention to the "embodiment" of ice-snow tourists.Moreover,most of the ice-snow tourism strategies are proposed from the qualitative viewpoint,but how to evaluate strategies’ effectiveness from a quantitative perspective is still uneasy.However,a few studies have used the simulation method to evaluate strategies’ effectiveness,but they have not paid enough attention to the cognitive and psychological factors that affect tourists’ destination choices.In addition,there is insufficient explanation for the differences in behavioral decision-makings of first-time tourists and revisit tourists in the ice-snow tourism destination choice.In order to go one-step ahead in the research area,this paper takes Wanlong Paradise Resort,Thaiwoo Ski Resort,Lake Songhua Resort and Wanda Changbaishan International Resort as research cases.The content analysis method is applied to explore the influencing factors of ice-snow tourism destination choice.Secondly,a number of realistic index data are selected to quantify the variables related to destination choice,and the sensitivity coefficients of first-time tourists and revisit tourists to different influencing factors is set to be different.Then,Net Logo software is used to construct an agent-based model of ice-snow tourism destination choice,and the relative program is called ISTSim1.0.Finally,combined with the actual situation of domestic ice-snow tourism destinations,six strategic scenarios are proposed according to the three kinds of strategies,such as enhancing kinesthetic experience,improving e-WOM and offering price discount.Then,ISTSim1.0 is used to evaluate the outcomes of applying strategic scenarios.The strategy simulation results show that:(1)Among the three kinds of strategies,the eWOM improvement strategy has the most significant effect on increasing the market share of destinations.At the same time,compared with the revisit tourist market,the e-WOM promotion strategy has a more significant effect on attracting the first-time tourist market.(2)The kinesthetic enhancement strategy has the most significant effect on increasing the market share of revisit tourists in ice-snow tourism destinations.(3)There are obvious differences in the sensitivity of the potential tourist market to the implementation of price promotion strategies in different ice-snow tourism destinations,suggesting that ice-snow tourism destinations should carefully formulate price promotion strategies according to the actual situation.This paper has the following theoretical contributions and managerial implications.In the research on the behavior mechanism of ice-snow tourism destination choice under the framework of the theory of planned behavior,the perspective of embodied cognition is innovatively introduced,which makes up for the lack of attention to tourists’ embodiment in tourism destination choice research.At the same time,the application of the agent-based modelling approach in the research field of ice-snow tourism destination choice is expanded.This paper prompts ice-snow tourism practitioners to pay attention to the psychological and embodied cognitive factors of tourists’ destination choices,and ISTSim1.0 can pre-assess the strategy effectiveness for ice-snow tourism practitioners.In addition,this paper explores the behavioral differences between first-time tourists and revisit tourists in the ice-snow tourism destination choices,and the research results provide practical guidance for ice-snow tourism practitioners to adopt differentiated tourism strategies for different market segments.