Exploring The Astro-tourism Development Strategy Of Ynao Based On Tourist Experience

Astro-tourism is a tourism activity with astronomical phenomena or facilities as the main attraction.Depending strongly on some very attractive sky phenomena,astronomy-related tourism activities have existed worldwide for a long time.As an emerging research topic,though a rising trend,astro-tourism has been paid little attention in the tourism literatureDue to the late development and its commonweal characteristics,astro-tourism has the mission to provide excellent educational function and tourist experience.Therefore,the purpose of the current thesis is to provide some suggestions about the development and management of astro-toursim in the Yunnan Observatories(YNAO),based on the tourist experience of a famous observatory park,the Griffith Observatory,obtained from reviews posted in the webFirstly we present our exploration on the tourist experience,by analyzing the high-frequency words in the review text from more than 10,000 travelers,and by statistically analyzing the quantitative comments(i.e.,scores).The main results are as the following(1)The tourists highly enjoyed not only the astronomy-related attractions,but also its unique landscape of nature and humanity;(2)The tourists were also impressed by its free admission to the observatory;(3)Tourist experience has little dependence on the four seasons in a year;and(4)The observatory has little attraction to solo touristsThen,we use the SWOT method to investigate the current condition of YNAO(from the manager aspect),such as strength(e.g.location,landscape of nature and humanity,market and human resources),weakness(e.g.management,propaganda,product and support),opportunity(e.g.tourism environment and Citizen's scientific literacy),and threat(e.g.commercial competition,diverse demand of tourist,and conflict between research and tourism).Combining these results with the analysis of the tourist experience in the Griffith observatory,this thesis also gives the following suggestions about the future development of the YNAO astro-tourism:(1)To jointly develop products by taking the advantage of the external environment of tourism;(2)To develop products according to the type and interest of tourists;(3)Free admission,but adding more paid services;(4)To expose the characteristics and tourism function of YNAO to the public by grabbing the great opportunity of observing rare sky phenomena;and(5)To pay more attention to the service quality,and build up more supporting facilities such as parking place.