STUDY ON STRUCTURE AND OPTIMIZATION OF INBOUND TOURISM NETWORK OF KEY CITIES IN CHINA
WANG Yong-ming1,2, MA Yao-feng3, WANG Mei-xia2
1. Eco-tourism Key laboratory of Jishou University, Jishou 416000, China;
2. Business School of Jishou University, Jishou 416000, China;
3. College of Tourism and Environment, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an 710062, China
Abstract Inbound tourism is an important component of tourism industry, which plays an import role in whole tourism development in China. Inbound tourists have different travel characteristics from domestic tourists, one of which is that inbound tourists often travel for a long haul to different key cities in destination country. These key cities are always famous for their scenic resorts, human heritage sites, or convenient transport conditions. This network structure has a significant effect on inbound tourism industry development of key cites, even on their background areas. In addition, significantly different from network based on transport relation, network structure based on inbound tourist flows can objectively reflect spatial relation between key cities and behavior feature of inbound tourists. But there are very few literatures searching on network structure of key cities and its optimization strategies. Based on development level and spatial pattern of inbound tourism industry of different cities in China, this paper firstly selects out twelve key cities in China, then studies network structure feature of inbound tourism of key cities, including node structure feature and whole network structure feature using indexes of centrality, centralization, density and structure hole of social network analysis. The results imply that tourism network of China's key city nodes have a total 46 pairs of tourism flow relations. Each node has relationship of tourist flow concentration and diffusion with other 3.83 nodes, and the number of being an agent in the tourism network is 8.25.
2013, Vol. 28 
