反季旅游与旅游季节性平衡:研究述评与启示

季节性是旅游产业最重要的特征之一,对旅游业发展具有重要的影响作用。国内外学者对旅游季节性的含义、测度、成因和影响进行了大量研究,并提出了一些缓解旅游季节性的措施和方法。近年来渐渐兴起的反季旅游成为应对旅游季节性的有效措施。深刻理解反季旅游的内涵和特征,努力实现反季旅游常态化,能有效解决旅游季节性造成的产业失衡问题。但从国内外现有文献来看,有关反季旅游的研究成果却十分有限。文章的主要工作是对旅游季节性和反季旅游相关的国内外研究成果进行梳理,并进一步对反季旅游研究和开发的策略进行分析。首先,对气候与旅游方面的研究文献进行了简单回顾;其次,对旅游季节性的国内外研究成果进行了综述;然后,对反季旅游的概念和内涵进行了剖析和界定,并重点对利用反季旅游缓解季节性的研究成果进行了讨论;最后,提出了我国反季旅游开发的对策和建议。

Anti-season Tourism and Tourism Seasonality Mitigation. Current Research and Relevant Implications

Seasonality has long been regarded as one of the most typical features of the tourism industry. It usually refers to a temporal imbalance in the number of tourists, their expenditure, and bed nights for destinations. For investors, due to the instability of tourism revenues over seasons and under-or-over utilization of the same resources and facilities, tourism seasonality remains a challenge in forecasting returns on investment. Therefore, destinations with high seasonality may have difficulty in gaining access to capital because of high risk of investment. Many tourism destinations with obvious low-high switch problems are suffering from this phenomenon every year. For the tourism industry, seasonality is viewed as problematic but is little understood by not only the academic community but also the domains of policy making and management. Accordingly, great efforts should be made to mitigate the negative effects of seasonality through a variety of approaches such as winter tourism （e. g. skiing）, cultural tourism, religion tourism, event tourism, conference and exhibition tourism, healthcare tourism, medical tourism, social tourism. These approaches are usually supported by both governments and relevant stakeholders through decreasing transportations costs for tourists, offering low-cost carriers among specific destinations, encouraging old people or disabled individuals to take travel during low seasons （e. g. Calypso program in Europe）, etc.. In recent years, both researchers and practitioners are making great efforts to solve problems caused by seasonality. Although many academic efforts have been made to understand the definitions of seasonality in tourism, its measurements, causes, and impacts, there is very limited literature on mitigating tourism seasonality by using the tactic of Anti-season Tourism （AT）. In this paper, Anti-season Tourism is defined as not only a tourism format or even tourism product, but a continuous and normal phenomenon that tourists are willing to take travel during off-peak season. For this goal, Anti-season tourism provides both opportunities and challenges for researchers and practitioners in mitigating the tourism imbalance between peak and off-peak seasons. The purpose of this paper is to present a concise review on tourism seasonality and anti-season tourism research. It mainly focuses on current research and relevant implications on issues of Anti-season Tourism and tourism seasonality mitigation. Since five main causes of seasonality in tourism demand, including climate/ weather, social customs/holidays, business customs, calendar effects and supply side constraints, have been identified by previous researchers, three core bodies of literature, including climate tourism, seasonality in tourism and anti-season tourism practices, are overviewed in this paper. In particular, the definition of anti-season tourism is discussed and some research studies about bow to use anti-season tourism tools to smooth the impacts of seasonality in tourism are analyzed. Finally, some research directions and managerial implications for measurements of market potentials in different regions/ provinces and relevant strategies in developing Chinese anti-season tourism are presented. We hope this paper could attract more researchers and practitioners to provide efficient solutions in mitigating problems of tourism seasonality which have become very critical in China.