Understanding Source Market of Chinese Outbound Travel at Regional Level

This study concerns the tourist source market of Chinese outbound travel by justifying a geographic market segmentation approach and examining regional levels of the development. Two different empirical regularities used in urban geography were employed to measure the changes between larger and smaller tourist-generating places from 1997 to 2014. Research findings imply that 1) the tourist volume has been growing over time for all places under investigation with regional diversities; 2) as the scale of mega region (in terms of tourist volume) becomes larger, the small and medium regions respond rapidly to this change, imposing a shift on the whole market from a single dominance to a promising decentralized pattern. The purpose in this paper is to propose different models to account for this evolution. Understanding these implications may help western providers deliver suitable goods and services to China market in different cultural contexts.