Nankai University has been committed to promoting the exploration of basic tourism theories rooted in the practice and supporting the construction of Chinese-style modernization through the discipline of tourism since the establishment of the College of Tourism and Service Management. The team led by Associate Professor Li Chunxiao, a selected member of the "One Hundred Young Disciplinary Leaders Program of Nankai University", is committed to promoting the research on the construction of tourism particularity and basic theory.
Dr. Li Chunxiao graduated from the University of Nottingham in the UK, where she was a student of the well-known scholar, Professor Scott McCabe. Associate Professor Li Chunxiao has been selected for the Tianjin "131" innovative talent training program, serving as a doctoral supervisor, Deputy Secretary of the Youth League Committee, and Director of the Graduate Education Program. She is also a member of the Asia Pacific Council of the Travel and Tourism Research Association, and served as an editorial board member for journals such as Annals of Tourism Research, Annals of Tourism Research Imperial Insights, and Tourism Forum. Associate Professor Li Chunxiao is the leader of two National Natural Science Foundation programs and several provincial and ministerial projects. She has published more than 30 high-quality research achievements in top journals of tourism disciplines and related disciplines such as Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Management, Journal of Travel Research, International Journal of Hospitality Management, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Current Issues in Tourism, Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, Tourism Tribune, Economic Geography, Nankai Business Review, many of which have been included in the list of ESI highly cited papers. Moreover, her academic monograph on the basic theories of tourism, Tourism Particularity: Entropy Reduction, Demand Drift and Behavior Alienation, was published by China Social Sciences Press in 2023.
Associate Professor Li Chunxiao implements the education philosophy of cultivating virtuous and competent individuals in professional education, amis to cultivate innovative and responsible tourism professionals that meet the needs of China's modernization construction, was honored with the first prize of Tianjin Teaching Achievement Award. Based on innovation in tourism particularity, she has guided students to achieve excellent results, including the provincial bronze medal of the 9th "Chuangqingchun" National College Students' Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, the provincial bronze medal of the 8th China International "Internet+" College Students' Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, the national first prize of China Youth Tourism Creative Design Competition, the national second prize of National College Student Tourism Design Competition, and the first prize of Nankai University in Tianjin College Students' Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program. Associate Professor Li Chunxiao has also guided undergraduate students in research innovation and practical exploration related to the basic theories of tourism, and has won the Nankai University Excellent Graduation Thesis for 2016, 2019, and 2021. Additionally, she has won the "Excellent Paper Award" at the China Tourism Research Annual Conference for three consecutive years (2018-2020). The submitted papers in 2019 were unanimously recognized by the editorial board among more than 300 candidate papers nationwide and won first place.
The team led by Associate Professor Li Chunxiao has been focusing on the systematic changes in tourists' demand structure and lifestyle behavior patterns in unusual tourism environments from the "second life" perspective. The team's research mainly focuses on three specific directions: the impact of the unusual tourism environment on consumer behavior, the impact of destination decision-making on consumer preferences, the particularity of tourism demand in the digital age and the structural reform strategy of the supply side. Their work has made active explorations in building the theoretical foundation of the tourism discipline and expanding the current marketing theory boundaries. The specific research work includes:
1. The particularity of unusual tourism environment and its impact on consumer behavior
There are many interesting and special consumption behaviors in tourism activities that differ significantly from daily consumption habits and behaviors. For example, why do people save money in daily life but spend generously while traveling? Why are certain impulsive behaviors that they would not normally engage in justified during travel, such as anime pilgrimage and trying dung-flavored hotpot? Why is it so difficult to obtain behavioral loyalty from tourists even if they are satisfied? The reason behind these phenomena is that tourists are influenced by the three characteristics of unusual tourism environments: geographic differences, temporary stay, and anonymity, resulting in a series of behavioral changes. Specifically, differences in natural and cultural landscapes can reduce tourists' price sensitivity by enhancing their level of interpretation and changing their perception of price information cues as monetary payment mechanisms, thereby stimulating tourists to increase their consumption during travel. As a short-term activity, scarcity of time prompts experienced tourists to have an overconfident sense of superiority and increases their impulsive purchasing willingness. Finally, travel reduces the constraints of individual habitual social identity, and stronger anonymity changes tourists' perceptions of stereotypes, allowing certain stereotype behaviors that deviate from daily norms to be viewed as seeking new experiences, ultimately leading to positive emotional effects.
2. The particularity of destination decision-making and its impact on consumer preferences.
Tourism consumption experience involves many aspects of daily consumption, each of which is a "no return" decision for consumers. Therefore, the decision-making process is different from that for daily consumer products. It is a decision for a whole "second life" experience, with significant heterogeneity, subjectivity, and novelty in traveler preferences, resulting in seemingly elusive behavior patterns such as fickleness, cautiousness, and hesitation. To extract decision-making rules that tourism practitioners can grasp, greedy algorithms are introduced to simulate dictionary-style decision-making processes that inspire tourist preferences and deduce their key preferences for destinations. In addition, multiple time points are included in the tracking process for destination decision-making, and new decision-making domains, such as future activation, later refusal, and spontaneous domains, are extracted. For the paradox of high-satisfaction travelers having a low willingness to revisit in their next travel decision, dynamic comparisons of sensory impressions of travelers reveal that although they have a positive perception of the destination, this sensory memory fades quickly over time, resulting in reduced demand for revisiting the destination in the next travel decision.
3. The particularity of tourism demand and the structural reform strategy of the supply side in the era of digital intelligence.
Digital intelligence technology provides technical support for emerging travel formats such as virtual tourism and immersive experience tourism. The continuous progress of network technology greatly enhances people's accessibility to unfamiliar worlds, stimulating the development of unique and niche tourism formats such as adventure tourism, and animation tourism. After the epidemic, the therapeutic effect of travel has received much attention, and travel formats such as suburban tourism and family tourism, which can return to nature for recuperation or strengthen interpersonal relationships, have correspondingly recovered rapidly. The tourism industry requires accurate and systematic identification of these complex and diverse tourist demands and providing high-quality products and services that meet the inherent essential needs of tourists. Therefore, starting from the most basic unit of human needs, a three-dimensional tourist elemental demand model including survival, curiosity, and mirroring is constructed to describe the all-round characteristics of different types of tourists from needs to behaviors. Then, an in-depth research is conducted on the impact of product and service innovation of suppliers at different positions in the value chain on tourists' value perception, as well as the relationship between potential tourists' stereotypes of destinations and their tourism intentions, to provide a theoretical basis for explaining the ever-changing consumption demands and product preferences of tourists in the era of digital intelligence. It is found that the application of tourism intelligent robots differs from general service scenarios. Their role is not only a service provider but also an image ambassador and local atmosphere symbol of the tourist destination, thus satisfying the multi-dimensional needs of tourists and providing a valuable reference for the supply side structural reform of the tourism industry, especially the intelligent industrial upgrading background of China's tourism characteristics practice.
Here are some recent representative achievements:
[1] C.X. Li, Y. Wang, X. Lv, H. Li., To buy or not to buy? The effect of time scarcity and travel experience on tourists’ impulse buying. Annals of Tourism Research, 2021, 86.
[2] C.X. Li, Y. Wang, H. Li., Effect of time pressure on tourism: How to make non-impulsive tourists spend more.Journal of Travel Research, 2022,72.
[3] C.X. Li, S. McCabe, H. Song., Tourist choice processing: evaluating decision rules and methods of their measurement.Journal of Travel Research, 2016, 56(6).
[4] X. Lv, C.X. Li*, S. McCabe., Expanding theory of tourists' destination loyalty: The role of sensory impressions. Tourism Management, 2020, 77.
[5] X. Lv, Y. Liu, J. Luo, Y. Liu, C.X. Li*., Does a cute artificial intelligence assistant soften the blow? The impact of cuteness on customer tolerance of assistant service failure. Annals of Tourism Research, 2020, 87.
[6] Y. Wang, C.X. Li*., Differences between the formation of tourism purchase intention and the formation of actual behavior: A meta-analytic review.Tourism Management, 2022, 93.
[7] X. Lv, J. Luo, Y. Liang, Y. Liu, C.X. Li*., Is cuteness irresistible? The impact of cuteness on customers' intentions to use AI applications.Tourism Management, 2022, 90.
[8] Q. Li, X. Li*, S. McCabe, H. Xu., Always best or good enough? The effect of 'mind-set' on preference consistency over time in tourist decision making.Annals of Tourism Research, 2019, 75.
[9] S. McCabe, C.X. Li*, Z. Chen., Time for a radical reappraisal of tourist decision making? toward a new conceptual model.Journal of Travel Research, 2016, 55(1).
[10] S. Liang, C.X. Li, X. Zhang, H. Li., The snowball effect in online travel platforms: How does peer influence affect review posting decisions?Annals of Tourism Research, 2020,85.
[11] J. Bi, C.X. Li, H. Xu, H. Li., Forecasting daily tourism demand with big data: An ensemble deep learning method.Journal of Travel Research, 2022, 61(8).
[12] S. Tóth, J. Dul, C.X. Li., Necessary condition analysis in tourism research. Annals of Tourism Research.2019,79.
[13] H. He, C.X. Li*, Z. Lin, S. Liang., Creating a high-performance exhibitor team: A temporary-organization perspective. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 2019, 81.
[14] Y. Liu, C.X. Li*, S. McCabe, H. Xu., How small things affect the big picture? The effect of service product innovation on perceived experience value.International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 2019, 31(7).
[15] C.X. Li, X. Lv, S. McCabe., Understanding the dynamics of destination loyalty: a longitudinal investigation into the drivers of revisit intentions.Current Issues in Tourism, 2021, 24.
[16] C.X. Li, H. Li, Y. Liu, S. Liang., A research on the differences of inbound tourist perceived experience based on text mining. Nankai Business Review, 2020, 23(1). (in Chinese)
[17] C.X. Li, H. Feng, X. Lv, X. Li. The impact of unusual environmental differences on price perception from the perspective of construal level theory. Tourism Tribune, 2020, 35(11): 42-53. (in Chinese)
The discipline of tourism management has faced a dilemma of theoretical construction since its establishment - the lack of a systematic theoretical framework with distinctive characteristics of tourism as a discipline, and the reliance on theories from other disciplines for the application of tourism scenarios, making it difficult to exchange knowledge on an equal footing with related disciplines. As one of the key universities that first establish a tourism management undergraduate program in China, Nankai University, known as the "Whampoa Military Academy" of Chinese tourism education, actively relies on serving national strategic needs to promote the construction of the tourism discipline, and is committed to promoting the construction of tourism basic theories through abundant high-quality research, responding to key development issues of the discipline such as "why tourist consumption is different from other consumer behavior" and "why tourism management as a discipline is different from other disciplines". At the same time, it transforms cutting-edge academic theories into characteristic industry practices of "knowing China and serving China", continuously striving to promote the development of the tourism industry, enhance national happiness, and assist in the high-quality modernization of China.
（Translator：BI Jianwu，Proofreading：LI Chunxiao）
