| With the increasingly important roles cross-cultural tourism is playing in developing acountry’s economy, more and more scholars begin to study tourists’ consumption behaviorin a cross-cultural setting. Scholars from the United States, Europe and Australia havemade a large quantity of studies on cross-cultural comparisons of tourists’ consumptionbehavior and raised many useful suggestions to improve tourism industry of their owncountries. However, studies in this field are relatively less in China. The purpose of thisstudy is to identify differences between Chinese and American tourist groups regardingmotivations for travel, information sources used, length of decision time before travellingand preferred tourist activities, etc as well as to obtain some implications for betterdeveloping Chinese tourism industry.The paper reviews the previous literature on tourists’ consumption behavior andcultural impact on tourists’ consumption behavior. Hofstede’s five cultural dimensions areused to analyze the cultural characteristics of China and the United States. Then fourhypotheses from the aspects of tourists’ motivation, tourists’ information search, tourists’decision making and tourists’ travel activities are raised according to the previous analysis.Then an empirical research based on a questionnaire is adopted to test whether the relevanthypotheses are supported and SPSS is used to analyze the research results.The results indicates that the hypotheses are partially supported by the results. That isto say, there are significant differences existing between Chinese and American tourists aswell as some similarities. Explanations from the cultural perspectives are given for theresults which are different from the hypotheses. Therefore, it is apparent that specificmarketing strategies are required for each national segment. At the end, the paper providessome implications to help improve Chinese tourism industry from the aspects of attractingboth more American and Chinese tourists. |
