A STUDY ON THE CONCEPTUAL MODEL OF THE INFLUENTIAL ELEMENTS OF THROUGHPUT OF TOURISM AIRPORT
ZHU Feng1,2, BAO Ji-gang1
1. Center for Tourism Planning & Research, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China;
2. Business School of Shandong University at Weihai, Weihai 264209, China
Abstract The demand of tourists for air travel has increased rapidly in recent years and tourists has occupied more than one third of the whole air market. Thus, there seems a trend to build more tourism airports in China. Throughput is an important element when evaluating the feasibility of airports construction. This paper firstly defines the concept of tourism airport and divides tourism airports into two types. Compared with the general city airports, tourism airports have the following characteristics: (1) tourism airports are usually feeder airports and the level of aviation of most of the tourism airports are 4C; (2) the locations of tourism airports mostly are towns, counties or prefectural-level cities; (3) the regional economy of the locations of tourism airports is usually under-developed and it is the demand of tourists but not the residents to construct the airports; (4) scheduled flights are relatively limited and passengers usually need to be transferred from trunk line airports; (5) there are distinct high and low seasons and the throughput varies apparently. The paper presents the concept of ratio of throughput and tourist (RTT, in short) in order to find out the relationship between tourism airports and their geographic distribution. The authors choose 12 airports to study the throughputs and RTT. Since the statistics of tourist is tourist arrivals, but not the actual number of tourists, the paper analyzes the ratio of throughput and tourist arrivals instead of RTT. The result shows that the ratio of throughput and tourist arrivals of each airport were relatively stable in the past five years and the ratios differ along with the airports geographic distribution. This is due to the distance from the main tourist generating areas including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and their outskirt areas to the southwest and northwest of China is much longer than that from the main tourist generating areas to the east, south and middle of China. Therefore, the geographic distribution of airports in grand scale is the main element that leads to the diversity of the ratio of throughput and tourist arrivals. Furthermore, the authors establish a conceptual model of the influential elements of tourism airports.
2010, Vol. 25 
