Affiliations: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Jinling Institute of Technology, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Xinyi Dai, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Jinling Institute of Technology, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210038, China. E-mail: [email protected].
Abstract: Studies on tourism experience frequently emphasize antecedents, neglect consequences, and lack systematisation, which motivated us to explore an application of semantic co-word analysis based on the hierarchy of needs theory in the systematic research of tourism experience. We collected the texts of visitors’ online comments of the China Block Printing Museum at Yangzhou and conducted an empirical research, the results indicated that tourists’ activity-environment needs had three levels; experience of the tourism setting was positive overall; the experience of tourism activities required improvement; and the benefits of the tourism experience were unfavourable. The museum should enhance the ‘participation-dynamic setting’ to create an experience space for tourists, improve ungazed spaces to enhance leisure benefits, innovate the museum guide system to facilitate educational benefits, and develop an ‘exploring-expanding setting’ to create unique all-for-one tourism products. The innovation of the combination of theoretical tools and computational methods in this study is a necessary exploration to use qualitative materials to objectively reveal the operation mechanism of tourism experience.
Keywords: Hierarchy of needs, co-word analysis, multidimensional scaling analysis (MDS), travel experience, China Block Printing Museum at Yangzhou
