Discuss about the Destination Hainan Island in China for Domestic Tourism.
Hainan Island is an ocean island located in the southernmost province in China. It has an area of 35, 354 square kilometers (YU 2011, p. 90). Its nature-based beauty, outdoor recreation, and sporting activities have gained it recognition around the world. Hainan’s plentiful sunshine boasts a remarkable diverse ground for animals and plant life. The paper aims to outline the tourist attractions and analyses some of the impacts and issues related to tourism and development in Hainan Island. It also illustrates the policy implications in achieving sustainable tourism outcomes. Hainan Island tourism destination was previously a domestic tourism destination before developing to an international destination.
Tourism has been the primary industry of the Hainan’s tourist destination. People tend to have preference when making decisions on the destinations to visit. The visitor’s preferences reflect the needs of tourists. It not only predicts the tourists’ behaviors, but also helps personnel’s to develop favorite tourism products (Li SM & Tian 2014, p. 57). Most of the Hainan island tourists are domestics making at least a good percentage of visitors and the Hainan government has tried to boost the destination to an international venue. Hainan has put great emphasis on globalizing the destination. By October 2017, Hainan had reached 887,700 overseas tourists, 57.1 percent increase year-on-year UNWTO (2013). The data shows the increase value of the destination and the economic growth it has attained over the years. It has improved its services renovating itself and attracting international tourists. The graph below shows statistics of growth from the year 2009 to 2016. The evidence concludes that, the involvement of government and creation of awareness of destinations is key to its success. The growth is determined by the effort of the stakeholders to boost the destination.
Tourists attraction are essential to tourist destinations. Hainan island tourist attractions include the splendid botanical garden, coconut trees, and monkey island. It is also nature-based with around 4,680 species of vegetation with over 600 wild plants grow only in Hainan. There are over 561 species of animals including 102 types of wildlife under state species protection. Animals such as Hainan Eldi’s deer and Black Crown Gibbon monkey are only exclusive to Hainan. Motivation helps categorize the attitudes of visitors towards an attraction. Hainan Island also draws visitors as it surrounded by the South China Sea and geographic region separates it (Airey & Chong 2010, p. 298).
When planning the resource management of the destination, tourism is also used. The destination has beaches, for example, the holiday beach which is 6 kilometers long. The beach consists of sunbathing area, sea sports area, seafood, culture, and leisure area. All these attract a different group of tourists depending on their needs and what kind of attractions motivates them. The Roman-style Hot Spring Paradise is one of the tourist attractions which can accommodate over 1800 audiences, with different activities and performances, including water ballet, skydiving, singing, and dancing. There is a vocation center In the leisure area, with various kinds of camps and hammocks where visitors enjoy a quiet and comfortable night at here to achieve satisfaction and value for their money. According to Yu (2011, p. 95) a big area is covered with forest with beautiful nature-based tourist attraction sites. There is Qiongshan city which is 222 meters above the sea level. These scenes provide a relaxation mode for tourists and attract more tourists to the destination for holidays. The launch of international direct flight has boosted the tourist destination (Ambrosie 2010, p.40)
The destinations are also prone to issues related to the tourism industry. The visitation of people from different countries and backgrounds involves the interaction of different cultures, political and economic activities to the region. Below are some of the issues related to the Hainan tourism destinations. Both the local and international tourists visit Hainan Island. It leads to different issues or challenges such as language barriers requiring multilingual tour guides to assist the visitors from different walks of lives ranging from different countries such as French, Russia, English speakers, Spanish and many others. All these people require translation of the Chinese language in order to communicate. There are other factors affecting and boosting the tourist destination Hainan.
The state promoted the characteristics of cultural industry development and guidance of other policy documents to guide the Hainan tourism internationalization, standardization, and upgrading. The laws objectives are to build China tourism special zone as an international tourist island. It aims at attracting different tourists from all over the world.
The tourism industry has developed rapidly, and the need to strengthen the province economic industry has continuously improved the tourism products and services. There is improvement in infrastructure in order to enhance the visitors experience and ensure a repeat visit.
The region was assigned special economic zone in the year 2000 to accelerate the development of the regional tourism industry. It came with numerous special policies such as landing visa-free and other policies. It was aimed at attracting the attention of investors and generating tourists related suppliers in the global perspective. It is one of the key factors that enable destination Hainan accessible to the global world increasing the tourist’s visitations.
The destination is easily accessible to the Chinese citizens. The destination has only two seasons that is spring and summer making it lack seasonality and tourists can travel at any time of the year. It also has unique natural resources such as the grassland, coastal areas and mountains make it competitive in the market. It leads to relaxation culture making it preferred by most locals as their holiday destination (Chaperon & Bramwell 2013, p.139)
The business in the region can be described as unorganized, small size and has no competitive advantage. It is managed by unqualified managers leading to unqualified managerial situation leads to an unstandardized industrial entry admission with high personnel turnover. Most suppliers target short-term profit leading to carelessness to the tourism industry in the region.
Less consideration is given to long-term development strategy in the business plan in the holiday attraction destinations. They do not offer quality services in the tourism product. The employees who contact the tourist directly do not offer the quality service as required restricting the healthy improvement of the local tourism business. The services reflect the negative image of Hainan destination. Misunderstanding of different culture and customs restricts the quality of providing personalized services (Sun, Liu & Zhang 2017, p. 159).
Hainan province has less foreign language tour guides. The language barrier creates a huge gap among the visitors, and it becomes a challenge to foreigners visiting the destinations. There is need to fill the gap and have more tour guides speaking different languages and attracting international tourists too.
According to Liu, Tzeng & Lee (2012, p.420)tourist information did not exist for a long time in the Hainan destination. The information is necessary as it can provide multifunctional services for the tourists. It does not only provide information on the reception of business visit, but also the products are well illustrated, reception of tourist visit since the development of infrastructure is imminent.
Competition has increased among both domestic and international destinations. The gap is considerable among different tourist destinations globally, and international competitiveness of the tourism resources has increased.
Negative and positive impacts and changes of tourism activity on the host community at the location.
It leads to community alienation and the focus is mainly on the tourists. The needs of the tourists are given more attention as they bring in the economic growth leaving the community alienated. It also leads to bad behaviors among the community members such as doing drugs as they imitate the tourists who come with different ways of conducting things (Allen, Qian, Zhang, C & Zhao 2012, p.30).
Tourism also leads to traffic congestion, destruction of heritage and environmental damage. The tourists come with a lot of environmental pollution having effects on the people of the local community. The community can resist tourism in their communities in an attempt to save their cultures.
The national council of the People ’s Republic of China issued the first strategy development in the 1990 and the second national policy at the beginning of 2010. Hainan government has also issued some policies in an attempt to achieve the goal of being an international tourism destination. It has led to tremendous changes generated in the tourism destination in the tourism economy, infrastructure, society, and tourism environment. Below are some of the impacts of tourism on the host community Wu, Morrison & Leung 2012, p. 850)
The tourism industry development brought an economic miracle to Hainan since the establishment of the special tourism zone. It has affected the locals due to the economic results of development investments and different expenditures Wang & Xu 2014, p.102) The domestic and international tourism is the major strength of the Hainan region. The housing price increased rapidly after the policy issuances. It becomes too expensive for the local community to continue living in the destination. The living cost increased rapidly according to the national bureau of statistics of China. The overall prices of commodities increase with a percentage of 7.6% which is way higher than the average level nationwide (Chong, Lam & Yan 2012, p. 132)
Reports on media and publications have mainly focused on cheating scandals on restaurant, taxi and tourism agencies. Tourism has led to restaurants to provide poor quality ingredients with high prices and customer’s safety if they refuse to pay or try to contact help. It has damaged the image of Hainan tourism destination among the locals (Wang 2013, p 226). Tourism has led to increased criminal activities in the region.
Some of the positive impact of tourism my include revitalizations of traditions, expansion of perspective, increased environmental awareness. Infrastructure construction
The increasing demand of tourism led to the Hainan government to invest largely on infrastructure covering all the areas of public service including education, health, medication, and transportation. This has improved the lives of the locals with better access to health and quality education (Krutwaysho & Bramwell 2010, p.680)
Sustainability can be seen as a key driver for public development policies in the tourism sector. Major fundamental sustainability policies should shift in the direction of tourism development. For the government of Hainan island to achieve more economic growth from tourism, they need to be coordinated, exchange of information and clear responsibilities stated. For the destination to achieve the sustainable tourism outcomes for the destination, the policies below needs to be implemented.
A socio-political goal such as sustainability relies on the support and commitment of all the parties’ involved. It entails a process of transparency collaboration involving relevant stakeholders which will ensure the acceptance of policies and assist in their implementation. The collaborative arrangements for sustainable tourism are usually part of conflict resolution; problem-solving and capacity building process that are central to sustainable development. For example, the criminal activities in Hainan tourism destination can be solved by involving the community in the policy implementation where they could state their interests to avoid conflicts with the tourists (Bramwell 2011, p.462)
Another policy is coordination which aims at bringing together the key actors in the tourism industry in Hainan Island to facilitate efficient and effective communication. This will ensure the provision of quality services to the tourists and ensures the visitor return again to the same destination. Coordination will also ensure that new opportunities are developed, and they provide leadership to coordinate the tourism industry reducing uncertainty and confusion in tourism policy.
Decentralization aims at generating local solutions to connected to the problems associated with destinations. It emphasizes more on the role of local or community level organization in the sense that the community is seen as the adequate level at which dialogue and collaboration can bring about conflict resolution and consensual decision generate local solutions that may well be more closely connected to the problems (Pastras & Bramwell 2013, p.430)
A sustainable tourism policy addresses different issues which contribute to the process of re-thinking society and development which affects all parts of the society. Sharing information with the community plays an important role in enabling access to different information relevant to the development of tourism destinations (Logar 2010, p.132)
In conclusion, Hainan Island has a rich diversity of attractions and tourism resources; The government of China discovered the potential economic and social contributions of the tourism industry and had been making efforts to turn Hainan into an international resort destination. The announcement by China’s State Council of the ambitious national policy plan to elevate Hainan international tourism island to world-class international tourism destination by the year 2020 had a great impact on the destination. The development of the full regional tourism is treated as a major scenic spot to planning and construction in Hainan.
List of References
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