A study on tourist experience of traditional festivals from the perspective of perceived value:An example from Dai ethnic group's Water Splashing Festival at Xishuangbanna,China
感知价值视角下的传统节庆旅游体验——以西双版纳傣族泼水节为例

Perceived value is an important concept and theory in the studies of consumer experience and the quality of experiences.This concept has recently been employed to study tourist experience.This paper selects Water Splashing Festival at Xishuangbanna,an ethnic group,Thai's traditional festival as an example,through which Chinese tourists' perceived values of such a traditional festival are analyzed and verified.Based on qualitative interviews and previous literature,the paper constructs a scale of festival tourists' perceived values and measures festival tourist experiences in terms of this scale.It also tests the relationship between tourist satisfaction and tourist perceived values.It is found that tourist perceived values of the Water Splashing Festival consist of seven dimensions: cultural epistemic value,hedonic value,social value,price and convenience value,service value,conditional value and overall value.It is also found that the tourist satisfaction varies with different perceived values.Differing from western scholars' literature,this paper reveals that cultural epistemic value,as a pragmatic value,offers the greatest contribution to Chinese domestic tourist satisfaction.This becomes a contrast to the western tourist satisfaction which mainly comes from hedonistic value.