Understanding Mainland Chinese Tourists’ Motivation and Constraints of Visiting Taiwan

Abstract

China has been by far the fastest growing source market in recent years, and now is the biggest tourism source market in the world. Mainland Chinese travellers were permitted to directly visit Taiwan in 2008. Within a short period of time, the Mainland Chinese travel market has become the top source market for Taiwan's tourism industry. However, limited attention has been paid to the travel behaviour of this significant market, such as why and why not Mainland Chinese travellers visit Taiwan. Using interviews, this study identified a list of motivation factors and travel constraint factors. Three themes, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and contextual factors, influenced Mainland Chinese tourists' intention to visit Taiwan. Particularly, contextual factors, such as 'the cross-strait relations' between Mainland China and Taiwan, play a key role in influencing tourists' visit intention. Like two sides of the same coin, 'the cross-strait relations' could be the facilitator to attract Mainland Chinese tourists or the inhibitor to stop Mainland Chinese visiting Taiwan.

Linking Images to Information Sources: An Examination of Potential Chinese Tourists’ Multi-sensory Images of the United Kingdom

“…To gain an in-depth understanding of this under-researched phenomenon, a qualitative method was considered appropriate (Song & Cheung, 2010). Among the alternative qualitative approaches, interviews enable substantial amounts of information to be gathered on individuals' thoughts and interpretations (Song et al, 2016;Song et al, 2017). Therefore, this study utilized indepth interviews to achieve the objective of understanding multi-sensory images of the UK and their information sources.…”

“…As Song et al (2016) find that tourists and potential tourists have differing opinions of destinations owing to the influence of previous travel experiences, the interviewees selected for this study were required to be potential Chinese tourists who had not visited the UK.…”

The autoregressive distributed lag model

“…The ADL model incorporated with GETS has also been applied in studies of tourism in various destinations, such as Thailand , Fiji (Narayan, 2004), and mainland China (Song & Fei, 2007). In addition, numerous studies have combined the ADL and EC models.…”