Tourist Attractions Managers' Application Intention Of Ecotourism Certification

In the Copenhagen climate conference December 2009, China has made the solemn commitment to the low carbon and emission reduction. The tourism industry, which just entered in the golden-10-year period for the development and raised as the strategic supporting industry of the national economy recently, is supposed to carry out the basic concepts of 'sustainability', 'environmental protection', 'ecology' and so on, to make the greatest efforts for the development of the energy-save and low-carbon economy. Ecotourism certification, which is one of the important measures to guarantee the sustainable development of tourism industry, has been developing in China for more than 10 years as the hotspot for academic research. So far the research towards ecotourism in China is mostly qualitative instead of quantitative. While the limited quantitative research is focusing on the establishment of the ecotourism certification system, tourists' willingness to pay for the eco-label tourism products, government's role in setting up the ecotourism certification system, the research which considers and analyzes the ecotourism certification from the point of view of the suppliers is quite rare. In fact, the suppliers are the applicants of the ecotourism certification system, therefore, the willingness to apply for the eco label will directly influence the feasibility, reasonability and effectiveness of the certification system. Therefore, this dissertation aims to analyze the external and internal factors which effect suppliers' willingness to apply for the eco label by referring to Azjen's model of Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). The author hopes the result of the research could offer some useful suggestions to establish the encouragement measures to promote the implement of the ecotourism certification.First, based on the definition of the research objective, the literature review about the ecotourism and the ecotourism certification is first conducted to learn about the trend of research and the point of breakthrough. Especially, the research model is built based on the Theory of Planned Behavior, the theory of tourism supplier, the theory of the ecotourism organization culture and morality. Second, the measures of variables are designed, purified and formed through the inquiry towards scholars, the interview of the managers of tourist attractions and the pretest analysis. Third, 344 managers from 30 tourist attractions in Tibet accepted the survey who offer the research data which are analyzed by SPSS15.0 and AMOS7.0 software later. According to the result of the data analysis, the research model and hypothesis are verified and modified. The following step is to conduct the Mean Compare to figure out whether there are important influences between the socio-demographic traits of the managers (sex, age, education, working experience), the recognition about the certification system, the attributes of the tourist attractions with the variables. Finally, the research results are launched based on which the management suggestions are raised as well.The main results of research are as follows:①the attitude towards the ecotourism certification, subjective norm and perceived behavior control of the managers directly influence their application willingness and the path coefficient of attitude is larger than that of other two factors;②managers' morality and sense of responsibility, expected outcomes, characteristics of tourism resource and external environment directly effect their attitude towards ecotourism certification and subjective norm;③managers'expected outcomes, characteristics of tourism resource and external environment directly effect their perceived behavior control;④there are distinct pairwise correlations among the four antecedent variables.