The Competitive Advantage Of The Perceived Value Of The Forest Eco-tourism Attractions Based On Visitors

Compared to service quality and satisfaction, a new concept, perceived value , is getting more and more attention from academicians and practitioners. Although many scholars studied the constitutes of perceived value and it's influence to recomsumption will of customers, there are still many worth discussing about perceived value. The article probes into perceived value of tourist in the forest ecotourism scenery,in order to enrich customer value theory futher.The aims of the study are mostly three aspects, as followed, (1)designing a perceived value table of tourist in the forest ecotourism scenery; (2)based on illuminating the relation between tourist behavior intent and competition advantage, verifying the relations of perceived benefit, perceived cost, tourist collectivity perceived value, tourist satisfaction and tourist behavior intent through composing frame equation model; (3)through the methods of customer value analysis, making an overall estimation of tourist perceived value in forest ecotourism scenery, making a clear knowledge of the market orientation of own side and antagonist, and analyzing competition relation and competition intensity of the scenery, thus effectively establishing customers value stratagem so that the tourists can get more value. All the three aspects are analyzed in detail in Chapter 3 ,Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 of the article.Developing process and methods of FECOSAVAL are brought forward in Chapter 3 summarizing the studies on customers value and service quality of some scholars, such as Gail; Parasuraman, Zeithaml & Zeithaml;Sweeney & Soutar. Firstly, questionnaire about FECOSAVAL is designed according to some interviews discussion with focus group. Secondly, simplified survey items about FECOSAV are available through two steps preinvestigation. Lastly, through collecting data, analyzing data and analyzing validating factors, the author developed FECOSAVAL. The study indicates that 8 dimensionality model including service value, function value, feature value, brand value, education value, emotions value, perceived cost and environment value, is stablest and has better gather effect and discerner effect.Mechanism model about tourist perceived value and perceived cost action to tourist behavior intention is composed and verified based on the analysis of the relation between tourists behavior intent and competition advantage clarified in Chapter 4. Demonstration results indicate: (l)the relationship between tourist perceived cost and perceived benefit is negative correlation, which means when tourist perceived cost become bigger, perceived benefit will become smaller;(2) Perceived benefit positively affected behavior intention, while perceived cost negatively affect behavior intention. But there is a psychological process during action of perceived benefit and perceived cost to tourist behavior intention. That is, through synthetic action of tourist overall perceived value and overall satisfaction, perceived benefit and perceived cost affect tourist behavior intention, but the direct action is not remarkable, and tourist overall perceived value and overall satisfaction are completely mediator variables. (3)the overall effect degree of tourist perceived cost, perceived benefit, overall perceived value and tourist satisfactory to tourist behavior intention are, from big to small, tourist satisfactory degree, perceived benefit, tourist overall perceived value and perceived cost. (4)the study demonstrates that tourist overall perceived benefit is an antecedent variable of tourist overall satisfaction. It means through tourist overall perceived benefit affects the tourist overall satisfaction, furthermore affects tourist behavior intention. (5)variance analysis of all kinds of tourist to 8 dimensions of ecotourism scenery perceived value indicate some characteristics of tourist such as sex, age, education degree, income, family construction, occupation, accompanier's quantity, times to the scenery, settling time, and tour cost, cause some differences in some dimensions out of 8 dimentions.On the basis of former study, in customers' value analysis method, the author demonstratively analyzes competition advantages of 7 forest ecotourism sceneries in Zhejiang province in 2006. The results show that the competition mentioned above is a competition at a level of "perceived benefits exceeding perceived costs", in which the competition between forest ecotourism sceneries is very violent; and that ,when 7 sceneries' average is taken as reference frame, there exist three patterns in forest ecotourism scenic areas, namely, "advantage", "average" and "disadvantage"; that, to obtain competitive advantages, it is not enough for an ecotourism scenery to be in the lead in only one aspect; and that, viewed from the competitive relations, the scenery trade has three competition camps and most sceneries vie fiercely with each other in the same camp.Study on tourist perceived value just appears at home, so the research in the article is exploring, and the author only gave a demonstration on the basis of 7 national forest parks in Zhejiang province. The samples are limited, so the conclusion can't be popularized to ecotourism service of variant types, and its reliability and generality of conclusion need verification. Application scope of structural equation model can be widen in the future' study, and relationship of structural variables in the above model needs further checking; for optimizing the model, researchers can add some new variables such as substitute attraction, exchange value to it, thus they can deeply apperceive formative mechanism of tourist behavior intention.