Tourism Survey Research

This dissertation is composed of three parts, all dealing with tourism survey statistics: theoretical research, case studies, and monographic studies.Tourism has developed into a low-impact industry of fast returns for modest investments. Since 1992 it has been the world's largest industry. It impels linked development in other industries; it can effectively speed development of the national economy and increase employment opportunities; it has the necessary conditions to become a national pillar industry. In 1998 the country decided to make the tourism industry a new national economic growth point. The Xiamen municipal government has also determined it as one of Xiamen's key industries. Therefore, there is critical significance in a study addressing questions of, and promoting the rapid and healthy development of, the new and growing industry of domestic tourism.This dissertation begins with the delimitation of tourism-related terms, aiming to have a clear scientific perspective on tourism, and to avoid inconsistencies between claims and the real scope of tourism survey statistics. Importantly, it defines tourism, tourists, foreign tourists, domestic tourists, overnight tourists, and day-trip tourists in order to provide a theoretical basis for sampling surveys. At the same time, it differentiates "tourist accommodation" and "non-tourist accommodation". It explicates both progressive targets and instantaneous targets in order to avoid being misunderstood as chronologically chaotic.In studying tourism survey statistics, it is imperative first to understand the content of, and methods employed in, current national tourism statistics, and to clearly point out that these national methods are not compatible with local tourism statistics. Statistics from the immigration personnel at various frontier stations and from national surveys of domestic tourism (of the ratio of citizens touring) are especially incompatible with survey statistics of local tourism. A failure to recognize this would create a severe problem of omission. At the same time, we point out the following problems of national scale common in statistical tourism surveying: poor data quality; archaic survey methods; lagging survey data; human resource deficiency; difficulty of assessing the tourism industry's contribution to the national economy; and others. We make some recommendations for improving tourism survey statistics.We describe the level of development of statistical surveying of tourism, both domestic and foreign. Importantly, we analyze problems in this country's tourist sampling. Large disparities between the results of various local surveys make it impossible for local surveys to be compared with one another; nor can local surveys be compared with national ones. We believe the principle reasons are: there isdisparity in the conception of the domestic tourist, sampling methods are not universal; the totality surveyed or calculated is inconsistent. Although the National Tourism Administration and Statistics Bureau issued the Implementation Program for Sampling of Local Domestic Tourism (referred to below as the Implementation Program), there are still a significant number of problems that need improvement.One problem with the Implementation Program's definition of tourists: we believe the conception of the domestic tourist should be adjusted to this more reasonable, scientific one: a person who "is not employed far from his hometown, yet has an income, and leaves his residential environment for some other national destination for sight-seeing, touring, vacationing, or some other touristic activity." This avoids the inclusion of those who have gone to coastal regions seeking employment or labor and return home without finding work (and without acquiring income).A second problem with the Implementation Program's definition of tourists: we believe people's activities within the cities, or within the rural counties, where they live and work should be counted independently. These people may be called, respectively, "intra-city...