How to explain the term "tourist flow"?

Tourist flow

Author Guo Laixi

The flow of tourists from the place of departure to the destination. Also known as tourism trends or tourism flows. Its emergence is restricted by many factors, such as geographical environment, national characteristics, living customs, personal hobbies, cultural quality, religious beliefs, professional status, age and gender, attraction intensity of tourist destinations, completeness of service facilities, reputation of tour operators, and guarantee of convenient and safe transportation. According to the change of tourism flow persistence, it can be divided into two categories: stable tourism flow and unstable tourism flow.

A stable tourist flow can maintain a consistent passenger flow intensity for a long period of time, and the passenger flow amplitude is small or shows an increasing trend. For example, in the Nordic countries, the climate is cold and humid. Every year, residents often take their families south and flock to the sunny Mediterranean coastal resorts for holidays. This kind of tourism flow is characterized by directional, reciprocating and constantly reappearing tourism behavior. As far as individual tourists are concerned, the choice of destination will change, but on the whole, the range is very small, because some changes in the flow of people will be compensated by other changes in the flow of people. Similarly, cultural attraction can also form a stable tourist flow. For example, Japanese who are deeply influenced by China culture can form a stable tourist flow when they come to China. In addition, religious pilgrimage can also form a stable tourist flow. So is root-seeking tourism. During the traditional China New Year and Tomb-Sweeping Day, hundreds of thousands or even millions of people from Hongkong and Macau often go home to visit relatives and sweep graves.

Unstable tourist flows are the opposite. In some places, due to special reasons, tourists can only be stimulated to travel once, and there will be no other tourists to supplement them in the future. This kind of tourist flow is characterized by suddenness, directionality and short time. For example, the four-year Olympic Games often make the number of tourists in the host city several times to dozens of times more than usual. After the Olympic Games, the number of tourists dropped sharply, and it is difficult to reproduce this grand occasion in the future. This kind of high-density sudden tourism behavior is called unstable tourism flow.

The tourist flow is often disturbed by political situation, natural disasters, epidemics and accidents, which makes the tourist flow change. The determination of tourist flow is generally accomplished by mathematical statistics, regression analysis, sampling survey and model prediction.

It is very important to study the direction, scale and grade of planning and construction of tourist destinations, as well as the layout of traffic routes between tourist destinations.