Supporting the Development of Homestay Tourism in the Yangtze River Delta: A Study based on Tourists’ Perceived Value

LONG Fei; ZHU He

doi:10.5814/j.issn.1674-764x.2020.06.010

Abstract

Homestay tourism has begun to flourish throughout the country, becoming a model of tourism innovation and upgrading, and attracting increasing amounts of capital. Through the collection and analysis of tourist questionnaire data for key cities in the Yangtze River Delta, and based on the theory of tourists' perceived value,18 factors related to the perception of homestay tourism are examined. Through exploratory factor analysis, three main factors of facilities and environment perception, cultural experience perception and service value perception are extracted. Then, from the perspectives of each of these perceptions, this study determines the degree of support for homestay tourism development in the Yangtze River Delta, obtains the key factors that affect the development of homestay tourism, and constructs a structural equation model of tourist perception and the degree of homestay tourism support. By calculating the regression path of the structural equation, the standardized path coefficients of the facilities and environment perception, cultural experience perception and service value perception are found to be 0.724, 0.813 and 0.692, respectively. These three factors have a significant impact on the development of homestay tourism agglomeration. Positive facilities and environmental perception can effectively support the development of homestay tourism, while the cultural experience perception provides its basic condition, and the service value perception constitutes an important factor of homestay tourism development. To better guide the development of homestay tourism, attention must be paid to developing the tourism facilities and environment, to cultivating tourism cultural experiences, and to improving of tourism service value.

Homestay tourism is booming, and it is becoming an important approach for tourism development. Homestay tourism is a product of the transformation of tourism from a focus on sightseeing to leisure vacations, and its forms of development are becoming increasingly diversified, deepened, and innovated, in order to adapt to tourists’ demands for leisure vacation consumption. Homestay is based on the strengthened support for tourism development, while tourism transformation and upgrading also need the assistance of emerging tourism formats such as homestay. The continuous integration of homestay and tourism makes the industries related to homestay tourism become continuously aggregated, and the chain of the homestay tourism industry becomes gradually extended, thus promoting the rapid development of a homestay tourism agglomeration area. The tourists’ initial understanding of the local sense of destination is based on dynamic contact with the local environmental form and the local experience gained by their own observations, analysis and personal experiences. Only after being interpreted and endowed with meaning by tourists, can homestay have tourism value. The appeal of homestay tourism is an important embodiment of the transformation of the tourism mode from traditional sightseeing to leisure vacations, and the perception of homestay tourism is of great significance to the study of tourism transformation and upgrading. In the process of domestic homestay development, the practice is always ahead of the theoretical research, while only a few studies have evaluated the support of homestay tourism agglomeration development. The research on the degree of support for residential development is of great significance to the shaping, construction, innovation, development and protection of tourism resources, tourism planning and other critical factors. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the degree of support for homestay tourism development from the perspective of tourists’ perceived value, in order to adapt to the new situation of homestay tourism development, and to promote quality development in tourist destinations, which is gaining more and more theoretical and practical significance.