游客密度、拥挤感与满意度——展览馆情境下游客拥挤感知的主要影响因素研究

Tourist Density, Crowding Perception and Overall Satisfaction:The Main Factors Affecting Perceived Crowding in Exhibition Halls

近年来,游客对文化创意产品的消费需求急速增长,使拥挤成为制约展览馆等文化创意旅游项目发展的重要因素。文章从环境-行为角度出发,综合运用环境心理学的相关理论,探讨展览馆情境下游客拥挤感知的主要影响因素,并进一步厘清密度、拥挤感知和满意度三者之间的关系。通过对378份有效样本数据进行相关分析、方差分析和回归分析发现:室内空间形态对游客拥挤感知有显著的影响,在折线、矩形、圆形和自由形4种不同空间内,游客的拥挤感知程度依次增强;个人社会经济背景特征方面,客源地和出游方式对拥挤感知有直接影响,来自中西部地区的团体游客拥挤敏感度最高;密度是影响拥挤感知的最主要因素,但不是影响游客满意度的关键因素;拥挤感知对满意度没有直接的负向作用,但在高密度情境下,该负向作用显著且得到强化。

The increasing demand for tourism consumption and the scarcity of tourism resources have become dramatic in recent years. Crowding has become a common phenomenon in traditional hot spots. In addition, along with the rapid development of creative cultural industries, all regions of China actively incorporated modern science and technologies into a wide variety of creative tourism projects,such as art galleries, science museums and waxwork museums, which have attracted large numbers of tourists. In contrast to other tourism products, exhibition hall or museum visitors need to concentrate on visiting, learning and understanding, while the physical fatigue caused by stop-and-go movements is more likely to result in tiredness. In this situation, a crowded external environment further aggravates the tourists’ stimulation load and affects the quality of their experience. Therefore, considering effective crowding management is vital to the development of tourism attractions, especially creative tourism projects such as exhibition halls.However, the existing studies on crowding perception mainly focused on outdoor recreation areas where the research conclusions about the factors influencing tourists’ crowding perception and its effect on their satisfaction have not yet formed a consensus. In addition, scholars in this field regard the natural landscape as the main object of study and rarely explore the human landscape. Therefore, as exhibition halls are a kind of cultural landscape, the existing research conclusions for outdoor recreation areas have limited reference to crowding management in exhibition halls. Considering the existing research differences and the space characteristics of exhibition halls, this paper starts from the perspective of environment-behavioral relationships by synthetically using the relevant theories of environmental psychology to explore the main factors influencing tourists’ crowding perception in exhibition hall environments and further clarify the relationships between density, crowding perception and satisfaction.Based on five proposed research hypotheses, this paper performs a series of empirical statistical analyses, including correlation analysis, one-way analysis of variance and multiple linear regression, on a usable sample of 378 tourists to four exhibition halls on Gulangyu Island in Xiamen, Fujian Province.The results show that interior space form significantly impacts tourists’ crowding perception. The degree of crowding perception progressively increased in broken line, rectangle, round and free spaces,where the latter were considered the most crowded. In terms of individual socioeconomic background characteristics, both tourist-generating regions and travel patterns directly impact crowding perception.tourists from the central and western regions of China were most sensitive to crowding. However, density was the most important factor affecting tourists’ perception of crowding. Thus, when the area is not increased or the space expanded, controlling the number of tourists is still the key to managing crowding perceptions. Moreover, crowding perception has no direct effect on tourists’ overall satisfaction;however, in the case of high density, its negative effect becomes significant and enhanced. Thus, without controlling the number of tourists reasonably, crowding perception may threaten the quality of their tourism experience. Furthermore, no significant relationships emerged between density and tourists’ overall satisfaction. Additional interviews were conducted and showed that tourists’ adjustment behaviors play an important role in the relationship between crowding perception and satisfaction. Therefore,management concerns should focus on making full use of interior spaceform, adopting differentiated strategies for different types of tourists, attaching importance to tourists’ adjustment behaviors and taking timely guidance and evacuation measures according to these warning signals.