Impacts of the high-speed train on China’s tourism demand167
articulation of the current public discourse on the high-speed railway.Meanwhile,destination planners can initiate corresponding productdevelopmentand marketing strategies to explore more fully the vast potentialbrought about by the high-speed railway. Regional cooperation, enrichment oftourism products and integration of the broader tourist transport infrastructureare appropriate strategies. With regard to industry practitioners, moreinnovativemarketing campaigns should be devised to incorporate the high-speed rail components into the general travel package. An issue worthy ofimmediate attention is the design of itineraries that will ensure both timeefficiency and experience optimization (Zhang, 2010). At the same time, effortsshould be made to improve the service quality of the staff from all componentsof the industry, so that the ‘software aspects’ of the tourism industry can keepabreast with the ‘hardware aspects’, as represented by the high-speed railway.This study is not without its limitations. First, there is room for refinementof the econometric model used. Other important independent variables can beintegrated into the current model to enhance its validity and approximation ofreality. Especially, factors relevant to inbound tourism such as exchange ratesand international transport expenses could be explored, through which a morecomplete delineation of the effects of the high-speed railway on local tourismdevelopment can be derived. Meanwhile, the periods studied could be extendedto include more data for model testing, and better models than ARMA couldbe used to produce more tenable results, particularly in terms of diminishingthe influence of external factors. Furthermore, since this study focuses only onthe economic effects of the high-speed railway at the macro level, researchefforts on the decision-making and travel behaviour of tourists taking the high-speed train would definitely enhance our understanding of the tourismimplicationsof the high-speed railway. Last but not least, the research subjectcould be expanded to other high-speed routes in China and around the world,and the samples could be extended to include international visitors, thusenhancing the reliability of results.
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