'Cultural Tourism Impact’: International Comparisons – China and the UK

Cultural tourism is concerned with a country or region's culture, more specifically the lifestyle of the people in those geographical areas, their history, art, architecture, religion, and other elements that helped shape their way of life and accounts for approximately 40% of all international tourism in 2007(OECD, 2009). However, there is a need to protect the indigenous culture in order to sustain tourist flows. Sichuan Province is one of the most famous tourist destinations in China with famous heritage attraction sites such as the Giant Panda Reserve, the Leshan Giant Buddha.

The aim of this research is to investigate and analyze tourist motivation in terms of cultural perspectives and to identify cultural tourism impacts (positive/negative) to local society/destination country and the perceptions of the key stakeholders on culture tourism. The project objectives are:
• To investigate and identify the aspects which are doing better/worse on cultural tourism.
• To analyze the impacts of cultural tourism on local society/destination and the perceptions of key stakeholders
• Tourist behavior:

Before visit: To analyze cultural tourist motivation and to estimate the relative weights of culture in tourist motivations.
During visit: To analyze the perceived values and satisfaction of culture tourists.
After visit: To analyze the tourist values and their levels of enjoyment and loyalty.
• To analyze the relationships among these three stages (before, during and after visit) for tourist in order to extract impact relationships (Hypotheses).
• To conduct a comparative cross culture analysis between China and UK on cultural tourism.
• Recommendations:

To provide comments and suggestions with the analytical results to local governments and local tourism organizations.