The UK as a Destination Choice for Chinese Tourists: An Analysis of Tourist Motivation Factors

With a population of over 1.3 billion and a rapidly expanding economy, the Peoples Republic of China has the potential to exert greater influence over the development of tourism worldwide over the next decade than perhaps any other country (King, 2003). Currently the UK accounts for merely 0.6% of all outbound trips from China (visitBritain.com, 2006). To explore in Chinas outbound travel market for UK, the examination of tourist motivation factors in Chinese context is necessary to see whether they are playing roles in motivating Chinese tourists to travel to the United Kingdom, for it is believed that tourist motivation is the driving force behind all tourist behaviours including destination choice (e.g., Mayo and Jarvis, 1981; Jamrozy and Uysal, 1994). In this dissertation, a questionnaire survey covering the socio-psychological motives, destination attributes, destination image, tourist culture and behaviour mode and demographic variables was carried out on Chinese tourists, including both visitors and non-visitors to Britain, as it has been commonly accepted in the related literature that one approach to effectively explain the travel motivations is to apply the push-pull framework (Cha et al., 1995); at the same time, destination image has been proposed to influence tourist motivation as pull factors (Gilbert and Terrata, 2001), and demographics and tourist culture background also contribute to specific stimuli that motivate people to travel (Beerli and Martin, 2004). The survey result shows that Chinese tourists are generally pushed by the desire of expanding knowledge, feeling the varying culture and broadening experience, and pulled by the tourist attractions that serve to meet their need of knowledge seeking. They incline to associate Britain with its traditional image, rather than modern image. What is more, demographic variables like age and gender contribute to the different attitudes on tourist / travel motivation factors. They further account for the difference between visitors and non-visitors