A Study on Preferences and Behavioral Patterns of Chinese Tourists in Kansai Region,Japan

This study investigates the travel objectives and motivation both first-time and repeat Chinese tourists. We conduct a questionnaire survey of Chinese tourists at Kuromon Market as a pilot, which asked about the experiences and travel objectives for target tourists. The results indicate that the upper class people travels the most times, and the main attractive for Chinese tourists are food culture, historical culture, clean weather and beautiful environment and service in Japan. 72.2% in 1990. (1) So the new rich tourists from China are followed with interest all over the world. From Japan’s aspect, “Washoku” became to be one of Intangible Cultural Heritages in 2013, the number of foreign tourists jumped sharply. Among the tourists from different regions, the distribution is shown as South Korea (2,456 thousand), Taiwan (2,211 thousand), China (1,315 thousand), US. (799 thousand) and HongKong (746 thousand). Among the top 5 regions, there are 3 regions’ tourists who are Chinese, so it is not only meaning for Kansai area but also Japan to analyze the Chinese tourists’ behavior motivation. In this paper, we conduct a questionnaire survey of Chinese tourists to create our database of visitor characteristics, frequency of visits and travel objectives, and airline information, we investigate travel objectives of both first-time and repeat Chinese tourists (323 samples) in Kansai area (Kuromon Market, Osaka), and this analysis provides an important clue to understand which kinds of motivation for the first-time tourists are, and why a first-time visitor becomes a repeat visitor. Our approach, which conducts questionnaire survey to Chinese tourists, is a unique approach. Also we separate the Chinese tourists by different rich level, and airline information, which is also our contribution to the literature. The rest of our paper is organized as follows : section 2 reviews the relevant literature survey. Section 3 presents the research design and methodology. Section 4 gives the results of analysis base on the survey data. Section 5 discusses the empirical results, and finally section 6 concludes. 32 (1) The data is from “Adjustment of Functional Income Distribution : Thinking of the Phenomenon of National Income Inclining to Individual. ” The Economic Research Journal, 1992, No. 7. 2. Literature Survey We conducted the literature review in this part to better illustrate and support our paper. Clottey and Lennon (2003) examined the tourists’ current perception towards Lithuania, a new travel destination in Germany as well as influential variables of destination choice. The paper pointed out that there was a positive mouth communication effect between the tourists who had visited the place and those who were considering traveling to the place. For other factors that could influence the choice of tourists to the city for a second time, the study investigated the types of sightseeing spots that were likely to be visited again. Some papers focus on the relationship between tourists’ satisfaction and times of visit. Metin Kozak (2001) found the multiple relationships among satisfaction of tourists, their previous visits and behavioral intention to revisit by conducting research in two distinct destinations. The results of the study suggested that the more mature a destination was, the more possible that it would be attractive to repeat tourists. For Ledesma et al. (2005), asymmetrical information problem was mentioned to illustrate the repeated purchase behavior in the tourist market. The researchers find out that the length of stay in the tourism site and the information gained from previous visits and / or relatives and friends might increase the frequency of return to a destination. Truong and King (2009) made contribution in providing the factors determining travel behavior including the effect of cultural characteristics such as socio-demographics, travel characteristics and behavioral intentions tourist perceptions and satisfaction. Correia et al. (2007) further used a random parameter logit model to analyze the characteristics such as individual characteristics, motivation associated with the probability of revisit. Duncan Light (1996) reported that tourists were likely to be attracted to the A Study on Preferences and Behavioral Patterns of Chinese Tourists.