Abstract European outbound tourism market is the biggest outbound tourism market in the world. Research on the inbound European tourist flows has great theoretical and practical significance to expand inbound tourism market for China. Inbound tourism flows was a core subject in tourism research field. However, from the viewpoint of the overall and macroscopic association, the study on the inbound European tourist flows based on social network analysis, has not been done to date. This paper depicted not only the properties of inbound European tourist flows network, but also studied the structure of the network as well. Then we tried to make a judgment about if the inbound European tourist flows network was a network with scalefree property and small-word effect or not. The conclusions are: ① it is verified that the inbound European tourist flows network is a network with scale-free property and small-world effect; ② Beijing and Xi'an are tourist flow diffusion centers. Shanghai and Hong Kong are tourist flow concentration centers; ③ the network has low density, high centralization and low compact degree. Tourists flow is not closely associated, diffusing and concentrating in a few core cities; ④ the nodes composing the network are polarized into central nodes and fringe nodes evidently. Based on the above conclusions, we put forward the following suggestions concerning developing our inbound tourism industry and expanding the scale of inbound European tourist flows: ① keep core nodes and place great emphasize on tourism crisis management; ② upgrade important city nodes and maintained the stability of tourist flows network; ③ strengthen tourism marketing and expand the number of tourism destinations in China; ④ enhance cooperation with Hong Kong and develop advantage tourism routines with it.
2013, Vol. 28 
