KOREASCHOLAR

The growth of the Chinese outbound market has been phenomenal during recent years and still highly concentrates on neighboring Asian destinations. In particular, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region heavily depends and focuses on the Chinese tourism market. Recent calls for a possible diversification of the tourism market have nevertheless failed to shed light on how Hong Kong residents perceive the benefits of mainland Chinese tourism. In order to mend this gap, this study collected 850 online questionnaires with Hong Kong residents. Subsequent cluster analysis has shown that there are 3 segments in regard, namely “low”, “moderate” and “high” perceived benefits. A significant age gap among these 3 clusters was identified, with older respondents generally perceiving the highest benefit. Fifteen semi-structured follow-up interviews have shown the reason to be predominance of idealism in younger generations of Hong Kong, while older generations tend to be pragmatic. Possibilities for future studies are finally highlighted.

• Phillip Wassler(The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China James F. Petrick, Texas A&M Universit, USA)
• Kam Hung(The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China)
• Markus Schuckert(The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China)