A STUDY ON THE PREFERRED TRAVEL BEHAVIORS OF OUTBOUND TOURISTS BASED ON PERCEPTION OF TRAVEL RISKS——Case on Beijing Tourists
CHEN Nan1, QIAO Guang-hui1, LIU Li1,2
1. Department of Tourism Management, PAICHAI University Graduate School, Daejeon 302-735, Korea;
2. Department of Tourism, Hefei University, Hefei 230601, China
Abstract From the view of perceived risks of outbound tourists, the social security issues are the war, the terrorism, politics, war crimes and so on; the public health issues are tourism and infectious diseases, public health incidents and so on; the natural disasters are earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, tsunamis and so on; the measure of travel prices, the price of foreign exchange and the fluctuations of the exchange rate. All these pose threat to the security of the outbound tourists. All the factors together constitute the risks of tourism; furthermore any of the factors will affect the tourist perception of security of the tourism destination. Due to the lack of travel risk perception and understanding, tourism industry often makes errors in dealing with the travel risks. The investigation of this study is conducted among Beijing residents who are above 18 years old, mainly from group tourism and individual tourism. The group tourism survey is conducted among the outbound tourists through Beijing International Travel Agency, and the individual tourism survey is conducted randomly among individual tourists at Beijing International Airport during waiting time. The survey lasted 50 days from January 10 to February 29, 2008. Through empirical investigation, this study analyzed the relationship between travel risk perception and preferred travel behavior. The results revealed that factor analysis extracted 3 travel risk perception factors (terrorism & war risk factor, public health risk factor, natural disaster & financial risk factor); 4 preferred travel behavior factors (preferred exotic culture, preferred similar culture, preferred tourism service, preferred popularization). Multi-regression analysis tested that travel risk factor has a negative impact on preferred travel behavior, it means when tourists perceive the tourism risks, they will cancel the tourism activities for self-safety. In the end, the study limitation and future research recommendations were discussed.
2009, Vol. 24 
