ABSTRACT
An enduring puzzle in tourism business concerns the tourists’ destination choice, namely, what factors determine where to travel? Thus far, cultural familiarity is an important non-economic determinant of international tourism but has received little focus in the literature. This study seeks to address this gap by investigating whether cultural familiarity—the extent to which tourists are culturally familiar with a given destination—would have a significant impact on inbound tourism to China. Employing the Google Books English fiction corpus, a compilation of English novels searchable for references to Chinese provinces, we constructed an index of cultural familiarity and used this as a proxy to measure the perceived patterning of cultural familiarity. Results from dynamic panel data models (1994–2004) demonstrate that the higher the degree of cultural familiarity with a province in the previous year, the larger the number of inbound tourists the following year. Examining the influence of cultural mechanisms on tourism activities shed light on the dynamics of regional development in emerging market.
