Research On Experience-Quality Assessment Of Virtual Tourism

In present-day society, the rapid expansion of science and technology has brought infinite power into the social economy, resulting in the ever changing of the connotation of tourism. Under the background of this, tourism has become more and more popular, being necessary for everyone. Also, as tourism now presents "democratization", the dimensions of tourism have been widened, as well as the levels been deepened. Since the mid-twentieth century, with the New Technology quickly developing, the computer has penetrated into our everyday life, which has changed both the human production mode and the human thinking mode. The virtual reality technology, being a good link between tourism activities and tourists, has quickly applied into the virtual tour, accelerating tourism step into an information-based era, named virtual tourism era.Virtual tourism is a product of the combination of high-tech and informatization, which will change the marketing modes of tourism enterprises, as well as the consumption patterns of tourists. Based on the infinite broad virtual tourist market created by e-commerce and online purchases, the economic scale of U.S. tourism industry has increased from $18 billion in 2002 up to $64 billion in 2007. At present, many travel websites have been set up to seize the fast-developing opportunity of virtual tourism. Nowadays, more and more tourism scholars have focused their attention on the rapid development of virtual tourism.First of all, the research discussed the connotation and characteristics of virtual tourism, the virtual tourism system and defined the three layers (information search, functional services and spiritual experience) about how the virtual tour technology affect tourism experiences. Also, the writer reviewed prior researches of tourism experience and experience quality, and explored evaluation models of the virtual tourism experience. Based on this, the writer determined the blank and opportunities of this research.Secondly, the research designed the technology acceptance model to evaluate the quality of virtual tourism experiences. The writer has put forward the hypotheses, assuming that tourists' prior experiences of websites has a positive impact on perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and perceived playfulness; Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and perceived playfulness have a positive influence on tourists'attitudes and intentions; Meanwhile, tourists'attitude has a positive influence on their intentions. With the aid of path analysis, the research cited the hot spring holiday villages as an example, finding that though the perceived ease of use has a negative influence on tourists'intentions, the other original hypothesizes have been proved right.Finally, this paper put forward some suggestions to improve the experience quality of virtual tourism, in terms of clearly positioning the theme image, raising the aesthetic quality of user interface, enriching the website information timely and improving the tourists'confidence. At last, the paper pointed out the limitation and the deficiencies, as well as the goals of further research.