STUDY ON PRODUCT CHARACTERISTICS AND DEVELOPING MODES OF RED TOURISM

Being different from other tourism activities, red tourism is derived from organized patriotism and revolutionary education and developing rapidly as a special kind of tourism product in recent years. It emphasizes particularly on visiting red sights and being educated with regard to other tourism activities. So it has particular characteristics: ①historical status is one of the dominant factors of determining the product attraction of red tourism; ②there is the overwhelming majority of domestic tourists who take part in red tourism; ③most domestic tourists travel at public expense; ④sight-seeing and being educated is the major traveling purpose; ⑤red tourism has particular season quality; ⑥"red tourist resources as the supporting role and green ones as the leading role" is the basic developing model; ⑦government-leading and in relation to politics; ⑧binding marketing of regional linkage; and ⑨promoting the economic development of the revolutionary areas. The developing model of red tourism has typical resource quality and political color. For the most red tourist destinations, they are underdevelopment areas. So government played a leading role at the initial stages by building favorable policy environment, improving the infrastructure such as traffic and accommodation and so on, and exploiting the other tourist resources while attracting tourists to travel. For the comparatively developed areas, the development of red tourism is mostly integrated in city leisure travel and culture travel by digging the historical literature of the intrinsic red tourist resources, and combining with the resource exploitation and the environment improvement around. Therefore, the development of red tourism should go along with the way of diversification and integration and manifold management of tourist products from the viewpoint of product system and catering for the changing demands of our times to achieve the true sustainability of tourism development.