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| A STUDY ON SEMIOTICS OF TOURIST EXPERIENCE——The Case Study of Xixi Wetland |
| ZHOU Yong-guang1, ZHANG Jin-jin1, ZHOU Ting-ting2 |
1. School of Management, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China;
2. School of Public Administration, Nanjing 210098, China |
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Abstract This paper aims to the study of tourist experience from semiotics which is a new point of view in order to find some fundamentals in tourist experience. This paper summarizes the literatures of tourist experience and tourism semiotics and the authors find that semiotics of tourism has not been fully probed into in oversea academia; while in China there is few literatures on tourism semiotics. Undoubtedly, studying signs and how symbols are read in tourist experience can make an innovating contribution to tourism theory studies. Tourist experience is essentially a process of symbolization activity. It can be concluded that tourist world is a world filled with all kinds of symbols; therefore, the tourists are encountering a lot of symbols on their trips. The authors point out that tourists' reading of the symbols is the leading activity in tourist experience and also the basic means. This paper, taking Xixi Wetland as an example, tries to explain tourists' experience from the interpretation and construction of semiotic. Xixi National Wetland Park is the first and only national wetland park in China, located at the west part of Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, a total of 10.64 square kilometers(26,300 acres). The park is densely crisscrossed with six main watercourses, among which scatter various ponds, lakes and swamps. Based on literature analysis and field research, the authors analyzes semiotic perception of tourists' motivation, symbol interpretation in tourists' experience and the construction of symbol system in experience quality by using the method of correlation analysis, hierarchical clustering. The results indicate that leisure and romance are the basic perception of tourists' motivation towards Xixi Wetland. Travelers of diverse symbol types are structurally different from the aspects of social attributes and the travel behavior, thus their travel quality is various. In combination with analysis of semiotic factors to experience quantity, a new theoretical vision to study the nature of travel experience is provided, and an effective way to enrich and strengthen the travel experience is offered as well in this paper.
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Received: 06 November 2010
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2011, Vol. 26 
