Tourism in UNESCO World Heritage Site: Divergent Visitor Views to Lijiang on Experiences, Satisfaction and Future Intentions

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper uses a mixed methods approach to understand local and foreign tourists’ views of the World heritage (WH) site of Lijiang in China. A good majority of both foreign and local tourists knew of Lijiang’s WH status before their visit. But the WH status appeared to be a strong brand to initially only attract first-time foreign tourists but this was however not the main reason in the final decision to visit Lijiang. Importantly, there was a divergence in the reasons between domestic and international visitors visiting this destination. This has implications for targeted marketing especially the growing international market which Lijiang needs to address by way of sustaining tourism which is the mainstay for this area. One strategy to attract both visitor types is to highlight the clustering of other WH sites near Lijiang. For the domestic tourist cohort, it will be helpful to devise destination marketing around the young and old and for international tourism, marketing based on Asian-Non Asian segmentation should be further examined.