旅游公共服务的理论认知与实践判断——兼与李爽商榷

在中国旅游市场呈现出大众化、散客化、常态化的新趋势下,旅游公共服务体系成为影响游客满意度和目的地竞争力的关键因素。由于旅游业在中国长期被作为高度市场化的经济产业看待,人们对旅游公共服务体系建设的依据和重要性缺乏认识,因而在理论研究和实践探索中均出现不少问题。文章检视了已有研究对于旅游公共服务理论认知的相关论点,着力分析了李爽等的旅游公共服务论所存在的核心概念认知矛盾、理论理解和实践判断偏差问题。在此基础上提出了笔者对于旅游公共服务的理论认知,从5个W和1个H的角度阐述了旅游公共服务的内涵、外延、属性、服务的对象与供给主体、供给机制与时空条件。文章认为,旅游公共服务的主体内容体现为旅游基础设施、目的地推广、旅游权益保障三大方面;其本质是公益性服务,服务供给机制和方式的多元化并不等同于责任提供主体的多元化;旅游者的共同需求和目的地公共利益的性质及其客观存在,决定了旅游并非纯粹市场化领域,政府提供旅游公共服务是正当的,也是应该的。当下中国旅游公共服务的主要问题不是过多,而是欠缺与低效并存。旅游行政部门虽然承担着最大、最多的公共服务职能,但对这一职能的性质、内容和功效的认识并不到位,与旅游者的期望和需求还有较大距离。

Theoretical Understanding and Practical Judgment in Public Tourism Services： Discussed Concurrently with LI Shuang

The Chinese tourism market is individualization, and normalization, but public currently enjoying a new trend of popularization, tourism services have become the key factor affecting tourist satisfaction and destination competitiveness. Because the tourism industry was regarded as a highly market-oriented industry for a long time in China, there is a lack of awareness of the significant reasons for establishing a public tourism service system. This lack of awareness leads to several obstacles in our practical exploration of this field. Lagging academic circles and ambiguous theoretical studies on this topic also restrict the practical development of public tourism services. Here, we first examine the existing research arguments related to the understanding of public tourism services. We then focus on Li Shuang＇ s discourses on public tourism services by pointing out the inconsistency in her understanding of some core concepts and the misuse of some theories borrowed from other fields of social sciences, together with her erroneous understanding of the practice of public tourism services. We argue that Li Shuang wrongly understood and applied the theory of new public administration and Ostrom＇ s polycentric governance theory into public tourism services, because the variety of public tourism services does not mean that the government is not responsible for the delivery of tourism services by providers. Polycentric governance theory is not suitable for application in the field of public tourism services because tourists, who are in an unusual environment, cannot become protagonists in influencing the governance of the tourist destination. Economic theories--such as the public goods theory--cannot completely explain why we need to provide public services in the tourism market or who should bear the primary responsibility for them. Nevertheless, political science and public administration theory could be better suited to answering those basic questions. On this basis, we raise our understanding of public tourism services, in which we articulate their attributes, contents, subject and object, temporal-spatial conditions, modes of providing, and the reason for their existence. We argue that the main content of public tourism services includes three aspects： tourism infrastructure, destination promotion, and an equality guarantee. These three aspects include 11 factors ： tourism infrastructure, tourist attractions, availability of destination-convenient public transport, tourism planning, regulation of the tourism market, tourism equality guarantee, tourist quality training, tourism consumption environment, destination promotion, destination information services, and destination market cultivation. We further argue that the public tourism service itself is nonprofit and for the common benefit. The public tourism service provider is intrinsically the government and its public sectors. The object of tourism services is the visitor. Attractive destinations are marketed so that visitors will contribute to the economy. The government may have several providing mechanisms, but the provider of public tourism services is still the government. The commonality and objectivity of tourist needs and the local interests of the destination mean that the government must provide public tourism services. The general Chinese economy, the tourism service system, and non-governmental organizations are currently imperfect. The tourism administration system manages the majority of the public tourism service functions, but they do not understand the nature of these, and the quality and effectiveness of services are far from realizing tourists＇ expectations and needs. Therefore, at this stage, simply copying and practicing a misunderstanding of the Western theory of new public management in China would be misguided. Both improvement of service practices and theoretical clarification are required.