earticle

영어

Within two decades, the rapid growth of Chinese rural tourism has shown broad market prospects which attracted much academic attention. The purpose of this study is to identify the factors affecting the behavioral intention of rural tourism in China and integrate theory including the modified theory of planned behavior, tourism motivation and tourism constraint to provide a comprehensive mechanism that explains tourists’ behavior in Chinese rural tourism market. An online survey was conducted across mainland China and a total of 634 questionnaires were employed in data analysis by structural equation modeling. Results found that tourism motivation and subjective norms are both significant antecedents of attitude, which leads to the behavioral intention, meanwhile these two factors also directly affect behavioral intention, but tourists’ past experience does not play a role. In addition, all the constraint factors have significant negative effects on tourism behavioral intention, but only intrapersonal constraint affects attitude significantly. The finding's management implications were also discussed in the end, this study aims to strengthen the theoretical and empirical foundation of the rural tourism literature.