Huimin Gu

Hongcun, China—Residents' Perceptions of the Impacts of Tourism on a Rural Community: A Mixed Methods Approach

The article reports the results of a mixed methods research study with a sample of 418 respondents in a quantitative study and semistructured interviews with 40 respondents, both sets of respondents residing in the village of Hongcun, Anhui Province, China. The quantitative study involved approximately 43% of the adult village residents. Hongcun is a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage site that hosts over 500,000 visitors a year, of whom the majority are domestic Chinese. The research was informed not only by past literature relating to the community impacts of tourism but also issues pertaining to place attachment, research paradigms, and the relevancy of past non-Chinese research to the Chinese context. There was evidence that the village still embraces tourism although disquiet existed as to past contractual arrangements made on behalf of the village. It was also found that the quantitative and qualitative data were mutually congruent, although the latter provided insights missing from the former. It is recommended that when past research is replicated in new cultural settings there is a need for a mixed methods approach to be adopted because dependency upon quantitative methods alone may fail to provide important contextual material.

Study of the Dimensions of Customer-Based Hotel Brand Equity

With the fierce competition in the hotel market, hotels have paid a great deal of attention to hotel branding to acquire competitive advantages. Therefore, hotel brand equity (HBE) has gradually become the focus of research in the industry. This article discusses HBEs dimensions and their relationships from the information economics point of view and the cognitive psychology point of view and proposes an HBE dimensions relationship theory based on them. Empirical research is provided and validates the proposed theory. The conclusion is that HBE dimensions contain perceived quality, brand credibility, brand image, brand awareness, information cost saving, and perceived risk. Among them, perceived quality, information cost saving, brand awareness, and brand image have a positive effect on brand equity, whereas perceived risk has a negative effect on brand equity. Furthermore, brand credibility is the mediating variable between perceived quality, information cost saving, and brand equity. Also, through the two dimensions of brand awareness and perceived quality, four HBE types are suggested: excellence, potential, crisis, and infantility.

Touristic perceptions in a Taoist Chinese village

The article reports findings derived from a sample of 357 questionnaires that were self-completed by respondents after a visit to the Taoist village of Qiyunshan. The village has a heritage of several hundred years as a Taoist pilgrimage site and in 2003 it was opened to the wider world through the construction of a cable car that takes visitors directly to the village. The main attractions are the scenic areas, the Taoist tradition, the residents, and a sense of harmony between place, people, and culture.