| Tourist transportation is an important component of the tourist system, and has had a profound impact on tourism development. High-speed rail is a technological revolution of the transport industry. Recently, with the high-speed rail network gradually formed, China has entered into a so called "high-speed era". As an important way of travelling, high-speed rail will have significant impacts on the tourists’ behavior. This study takes Nanjing, one of the most important high-speed railway hubs in China, as an example. According to urban residents’questionnaire survey and related information, this paper analyzes the changes and basic characteristics of urban residents’travel behavior trough empirical research, providing some suggestions for the tourism and transport departments.The paper is divided into six chapters. The first chapter introduces the research background and significance. At same time, it determines the research ideas and explains the data sources and research methods. In chapter two, the author has a review and summary on both domestic and international research from two aspects: tourist behavior and traffic system’s impacts on tourism.The third chapter outlines the relative concepts and the theoretical basis of this paper, including perceptual distance theory, tourist decision-making theory, hierarchy of needs theory and tourism market segmentation theory. In chapter four, the author focuses on Nanjing urban residents’ difference in response to the high-speed rail travel. According to their response degree of travel time, frequency, destination, distance, spending and mode, tourists are divided into three groups:positive, neutral and negative group of high-speed rail travel by cluster analysis. Then the author compares the demographic characteristics and differences in perception of high-speed rail of different groups. The fifth chapter mainly studies the characteristics of tourist behavior in the high-speed rail era. First and foremost, it analyzes the changes of urban residents’ travelling behavior. In addition, the author explores tourists’ choice of vehicles based on different travel radius. Last but not least, it compares the differences and similarities among tourists who choose various vehicles in travel destination, travel purpose, travel mode, travel companions, travel time, sojourn time, accommodation standard, dining preference, travel spending and draws the travel behavior characteristics of high-speed rail tourists. Chapter six is the conclusion and outlook of this paper, and provides some suggestions for the tourism and transport departments.Through the above research, this paper draws the following conclusions:(1) High-speed rail has significant impacts on the urban residents’ travelling behaviors and the development of tourism industry. The impacts include the following aspects:first, more flexibility in travel time which results in the popularity of weekend-travel and short-tour; second, reduction of staying time which brings new challenges to tourism destinations; third, greater willingness to self-service travel; fourth, expanding spatial scale of travel and larger attraction radius of tourism destination; fifth, increasing number of destinations for each travel, which will not only promote the integration of tourism resources, but also enhance the competition among tourism destinations; sixth, a higher travel frequency.(2) In the high-speed rail era, different visitors have distinct degree of response to high-speed rail travel. According to the degree of travel behavior response, Nanjing urban residents can be classified into three groups:positive ones, neutral ones and negative ones.(3) Among demographic characteristics, gender and age have little effect on the response to high-speed rail travel, while the educational level, occupation and monthly income are the main factors of affecting tourists’ response to the high-speed rail travel. Compared with the neutral and negative groups, the positive group has a higher education level in general, and most of them have a bachelor degree or above. A lot of them are enterprises management personnel and professional/cultural and educational scientific and technical personnel. Generally speaking, their income level is high, and nearly half of their monthly income is more than5000yuan.(4) Tourists have a high recognition on speediness, comfort, convenience and punctuality of high-speed trains, but the acceptance of safe, economic, symbolic and sight-seeing characters of high-speed trains is much lower.(5) Visitors have diverse preference for vehicles based on different travel radius. When the travel radius is from300to800kilometers, high-speed rail is the preferred mode of transportation. When the travel is below300kilometers or from800to1500kilometers, high-speed rail also has some advantages.(6) Visitors using different vehicles have similar travel mode and companion. However, there are distinct differences in travel destinations, travel purpose, travel time, sojourn time, accommodation standard, dining preference and travel spending.(7) The author puts forward a "high-speed rail travel mode" and enriches Lundgren’s travel mode theory. The main features of high-speed rail travel mode can be listed as follows. Firstly, the travel can cross a large-scale space(usually no more than1500km); secondly, visitors can go to a number of destinations along high-speed rail; thirdly, travel time is more flexible and there is a higher proportion of the weekend-travel; fourthly, the time of staying in destination is short(usually2-3days and not more than5days); fifthly, the main travel modes are self-service travel and semi-self-service travel; sixthly, in addition to the traditional sightseeing and leisure vacation, business travel has a large proportion. |
