Research On Pingyao Ancient City ’s Tourism Image Perception

Tourism in China has gone through four stages :resources orientation,market orientation,product orientation and image orientation, which is now experiencing.“Head battles” between the tourism destinations is increasingly reflected in the image competition. Many studies in the past showed that the positive tourists perception of destination image would improve the tourist satisfaction,the revisit intention and the recommendation intention; On the contrary, the negative perception would weaken the destination image and cause a series of adverse effects. Therefore,it is very necessary that we dig into the positive factors and negative factors of the destination image. In essence,the transmission of the tourism destination image should be in accord with the tourists perception. It is the key to the success of tourism destination marketing that we implant the image into the tourists’ perception effectively and realize the harmony of the transmission of image and the image perception of tourists. To reconcile the transmission of image with the image perception of tourists,we should be trying to explore to establish and strengthen tourists feedback mechanism,and strengthen the positive effects of positive perception factors and weaken the adverse effects of negative perception factors. Nowadays, with the spread of the Internet, more and more researchers breakthrough the traditional survey method. They not only use the way of questionnaire,but also use the tourist’s online reviews and travel notes as a data source to study destination image. However,the reliability of the text data applied to study and the relationship between the two kinds of data are rarely involved. In recent years,the research of ancient town is on the rise. But from the existing research,few scholars analyze what attractions draw a large number of tourists’ attention to come to the ancient town and in what way the attractions show. Based on above,taking Pingyao ancient city as a case and getting the image tourists perception data of Pingyao through two ways of the data from this paper and questionnaire,this paper aimed at using the method of literature review, content analysis, the grounded theory of qualitative research and comparative analysis to study the image of Pingyao ancient city,in the perspective of tourists perception,so as to provide reference and basis for the researchmethods and management of tourism destination image of the ancient city. This paper concludes as follows:(1)Web text can be as the main data source of research on tourism destination image perception. The paper summarizes network travel notes and comments by grounded theory,then codes them step by step and extracts positive and negative factors of tourism image perception of the Pingyao ancient city. On this basis, we validate the reliability of the text data through the questionnaire survey,and the result shows that two kinds of data are strong consistent. This method we used makes up for the lack of the deficiency about the network text reliability,and the network text will provide a reliable source of data for future related research.( 2) Text analysis and questionnaire investigation have their own merits and defects. Text analysis method can get the uniqueness of tourists destination image perception deeply, while the questionnaires have a unique advantage in getting structured data. In the future research we can combine two methods to analyze the case destination.(3)Two kinds of data together can highlight issues. When we use two kinds of data to analyze the same question,the stack data will be in need of attention in the process of image building. For example,in the negative perception factors of Pingyao,two kinds of data both include “bad air” and “the ancient city of internal traffic chaos”,and they explain that bad air and internal traffic chaos of the ancient city have a serious effect on the image of the ancient city,which is the urgent problem to be solved.(4)Through the measurement result of image perception of Pingyao,we find that image perception of Pingyao is mostly positive perception based. Seven positive factors of tourists perception are the history of rich cultural atmosphere,the simple and great ancient city wall,the exquisite peerless buildings of Ming and Qing dynasties,the antique folk inns,the convenient public transportation,the lifelike folk performances and the feeling that tourists place themselves in this ancient city. In addition,although the night scene at Pingyao,the honest folkway,the folk houses,and special foods account for a relatively small percentage of positive perception, they are also the indispensable positive perception factors in the tourist perception. In the emotionalaspects,most tourists have a relaxed and good time; In the recommendation intention and revisit intention aspects,tourists think Pingyao has a relatively good image,and most of them make it clear that the ancient city is attractive,pretty good,and worth seeing.(5)Negative evaluations of Pingyao ancient city mainly focus on six aspects:poor air quality, internal chaos traffic, over-commercialized, bad food quality and service,low sense of security,and poor management. Also,poor weather conditions and poor health conditions are the negative factors influencing the tourists. Those aspects should be noticed by the relevant departments.(6)From the analysis of demographic characteristics,it is not hard to find that the tourist market distribution of Pingyao ancient city is affected by the distance-decay law.We need center on Shanxi and spread towards the cities with convenient transportation,which reveals that we should pay attention to the urgency of strengthening the coverage of the remote market.