Abstract:

At present, China’s cruise tourism is still at an early stage of development. The basic development model is to construct ports and related facilities to attract international cruise tourists. Many of our coastal cities have taken cruise tourism as a new focus. Shanghai, Tianjin, Qingdao, Dalian, Ningbo, Xiamen, Shenzhen and other cities have put forward the ideas of building cruise home ports, and sped up the cruise terminal and infrastructure planning and construction, and actively created the conditions for the development of cruise economy. In this paper we established an index system to evaluate the development potential of China's cruise industry. We evaluated it from several aspects, including tourism resources, cruise business performance, tourism enterprises operating capacity, financial and insurance service capabilities, transportation security capability, city support and so on. Based on the index system, we took China’s eight major cruise cities as cases and did the evaluation using factor analysis method. From the evaluation results, we divided the eight cities into three levels, according to their advantages for cruise tourism development. We proposed that China’s cruise tourism would form a spatial pattern with two regional markets in the north and the south respectively, taking Shanghai as the homeport and Shenzhen, Tianjin as the regional central port.

Key words: China, factor analysis method, potential evaluation, cruise tourism