A Study of Thai Tourists’ Behavior Patterns in Hangzhou,PRC

Abstract

Currently the Thai outbound tourism market is expanding dramatically. The year 2015 saw 6.79 million Thai tourists travel abroad (increased 122.62% from 2005), which shows Thailand has become an important international tourist source. However, the literatures about Thai outbound tourism and tourists are rather insufficient. In terms of choosing destination, China has become one of Thais’ popular destinations for many years. 0.64 million Thai tourists visited China in 2015, but only increased 8.47% from 2005, which means the increased Thai outbound tourists flowed to other counties rather than China. The knowledge of tourist behavior helps to understand this phenomenon. Among all the cities in China, the city - Hangzhou is one of the most popular destinations for Thai tourists, and Hangzhou keeps attracting more and more Thais these years. This study, therefore, takes Thai outbound tourists in Hangzhou as the specific research object, and aims to explore their behavior patterns. A questionnaire survey was conducted to collect first hand data. Then the IBM SPSS Statistics software was applied to analyze the collected data. The result of this study summarized the overall behavior patterns of Thai tourists in Hangzhou. Besides, the variations of Thai tourists’ behavior patterns according to social characteristics like gender, age, occupation and etc. were also examined. The reasons for Hangzhou’s success were explored through the analysis of tourist behavior patterns. Furthermore, some suggestions are also proposed for the sake of attracting more Thai tourists.