Seasonality characteristics of tourist flows to the historic culture village (town) are compared with each other, taking Xidi and Zhouzhuang as examples. According to the comparison results, they have differences in monthly imbalance of tourist flows, seasonal patterns and three seasons partition.the Gini index of Xidi and Zhouzhuang are both lower than 0.5. And the latter is lower than the former, which shows the monthly distribution of tourist flows to Zhouzhuang is relatively more balanced. The analysis of the Gini index (G) and seasonal intensity index (R) indicated that G could be a substitution for Rindescribing seasonal fluctuation of tourist flows. Moreover, the Gini index is better than the seasonal intensity index in some degree. As to seasonal patterns, Xidi has a tri-modal one, while Zhouzhuang exhibits a bimodal one. Three seasons partition of two sites is obtained by k-means cluster analysis. Cluster analysis result suggests regularity of seasonality of two cases and season partition of Xidi is more regular than that of Zhouzhuang.
When analyzing influential factors, physiological climate suitability and public holiday are selected as two basic elements representing the natural factor and institutionalized factor respectively. As far as physiological climate suitability is concerned, the most comfortable months of Xidi are April, May and October and those of Zhouzhuang are May, September and October. But those months are not fully consistent with peak seasons of each site. So it is concluded that natural factors are not dominant ones in explaining seasonal changes of tourist flows. At the same time, peak seasons' distribution of Xidi is found to be identical with monthly distribution of public holiday. This consistency demonstrates that public holiday is a more important influential factor for Xidi when compared with natural ones.
The life cycle of tourist sites is also considered to be one factor that has impact on seasonality characteristics. Currently Xidi and Zhouzhuang are experiencing the development stage. Finally, it is suggested seasonality characteristics of tourist flows could be an evaluation index for judging developing period of tourist sites.