Research On The Perception Differences Of Tourism Image In Off And Busy Season Of Wildlife Scenic Spots

With the improvement of human ecological awareness and the increasing demand for returning to nature,wildlife scenic spots with functions of species protection,popular science education,scientific research and recreation have become important choices for residents in ecological tourism.Wildlife tourism plays a pivotal role in protecting the ecological environment,promoting economic development and providing human with nature education and tourism experience.Therefore,it has been booming worldwide.Meanwhile,this topic has become an emerging research hotspot for scholars in the field of tourism at home and abroad.Although scholars have made abundant research achievements with wildlife tourism as the core,few have paid attention to the tourism image and its seasonal preference of wildlife scenic spots.This is not conducive to the academia to understand the psychological and behavioral information such as the needs and preferences,concerns,and discussion topics of such tourists in different tourism seasons,thus affecting the optimization and enhancement of the tourism image of wildlife scenic spots,the formulation of precise tourism brand positioning and marketing image publicity strategies,and the development of targeted market segments in the off-peak season,and restricting the balanced further development of tourism destinations.Tourism image not only plays a vital role and influence on tourists’ perception,destination selection and decision-making behavior,but also serves as the core source for tourism destinations to attract potential tourists,cultivate the emotional connection between people and places,and form competitive advantages.Thereby,it has become an important proposition of tourism research both domestically and internationally.In the era of "Internet & Tourism," tourists can record and share their travel experience and feelings,and even make detailed and comprehensive evaluation of tourism products on various tourism websites and social media.These online reviews are the real reactions of tourists after their travel experience with prominent characteristics such as high authenticity,strong credibility,high timeliness and more comprehensiveness.Hence,digging deeply into the intrinsic value of the big data of tourism reviews is a new way and new idea to carry out tourism image research.However,LDA has been widely accepted and applied by tourism scholars in the literature examining tourism image through online reviews,but it ignores the impact of covariates(other information related to text reviews)on topics.Consequently,in order to enrich the literature related to tourism image of wildlife scenic spots,our study,based on the tourist gaze theory and cognitionemotion system theory,takes Chimelong Wildlife World,a wildlife scenic spot,as a case site,uses web crawler technology to crawl tourists’ online reviews on multiple tourism social websites.And with the help of the more scientific structural topic model(STM),the perception image of tourists in the off and busy season of wildlife scenic spots is deeply explored.The specific research results are as follows:(1)There are 20 tourism image dimensions perceived by tourists in Chimelong Wildlife World,which can be classified into four categories: transportation and service,scenic spot characteristics,scenic spot positioning and comprehensive experience perception.Among them,the topics of "large variety of animals","convenient ticket service","large number of people in holiday peak","children’s love" and "traffic in the park" rank the top five in terms of proportion,and are the top five topics with the highest attention and discussion among tourists.(2)The tourism image of Chimelong Wildlife World has an obvious preference for off and busy seasons,and the keywords under the same topic show significant differences between off season and busy season.(3)On the whole,the tourists’ emotion and evaluation on Chimelong Wildlife World are mainly positive,with high satisfaction,and there is no significant difference between off and busy season.However,its tourism image has obvious emotional preference.(4)The interaction between the overall score and the off and busy season,the year and the off and busy season has a certain impact on the tourism image perceived by tourists and the transfer of their concerns.The conclusions not only enrich the research of wildlife tourism image,but also provide theoretical reference for the management of tourism destination image and the creation of gaze style.