Segmenting Chinese Tourists by the Expected Experience at Theme Parks

In this paper we propose an experiential approach to tourist segmentation aimed at overcoming the limits of both socio- demographic and context-specific approaches widely adopted in literature and in practice. In this study, segmentation is carried out based on expected experience of Chinese tourists in Shanghai World Expo. Segmentation reveals four tourist clusters with different interests in their experience visiting World Expo. The clusters showed insignificant differences in demographics, but proved to be powerfully discriminant in tourists’ satisfaction and loyalty, which affirms the potential of tourist experience being a segmenting variable. Moreover, thanks to the analysis, an evaluation of Shanghai World Expo's success in terms of visitors’ satisfaction is provided.