Huang Xiaoting, Ph.D.

Dean, Department of culture and tourism management, School of management, Shandong University

Speaker

Experimental Research Sharing of TBL Team in Shandong University 

Tourism Behaviour Lab (TBL) of Shandong University is a quantitative research network platform for tourism behavior with open and shared data. We comprehensively use the theories and methods of interdisciplinary integration of tourism, geography, management, and psychology to conduct tourism behavior researches. TBL consists of Tourism Microclimate Simulation Laboratory, Tourism Virtual Reality Laboratory, and Tourism Eye Movement Laboratory components, equipping with hardware facilities such as tourism microclimate simulation cabin, eye trackers, ECG monitors, and VR equipment. Moreover, a micro-footprint application and a tourist behavior data collecting platform have been successfully developed to record users’ behavioral information during the travel process. 

In terms of tourism behavior research, TBL pays attention to tourists’ mobile activity and has conducted a series of empirical studies on tourists’ spatial-temporal behavior. Software and hardware devices in TBL have been used to manipulate, control, and simulate research objects, and a large number of lab- and field-based experiments were conducted to explore the antecedents and consequences of tourists’ behavior. Filed experiment sites include Hong Kong Ocean Park, Shandong Museum, Baotu Spring Park and so on. Laboratory and field experiment types include eye-tracking experiment, microclimate experiment, group decision-making experiment, and VR scenario experiment, etc. Based on the experiments above, TBL team has published several articles in renowned journals.  

Professor Huang Xiaoting is dean of Department of culture and tourism management, School of management, Shandong University; Chairman of the Technical Committee on tourism and transportation of the world transport Congress, Co founder of China Tourism Behavior Research Conference, Invited researcher of tourism planning and research center of Peking University.

She has put forward the concept of tourists’ spatio-temporal behavior and constructed the research framework and methods since she studied for her doctorate in Peking University in 2006. In 2015, she founded the first tourism behavior laboratory in China, which was called “one of the three landmark events in Chinese tourism academic circles in recent years” by Professor Tian Weimin, director of Tourism Teaching Steering Committee.

Professor Huang Xiaoting has been focusing on the study of tourist behavior for more than ten years. From the concept of tourists’ spatiotemporal behavior to the theoretical construction of the “research framework of tourists’ spatiotemporal behavior” of description, interpretation, simulation and prediction; Starting with the analysis of explicit temporal and spatial behavior trajectory, it gradually extends to tourists’ physiological perception, emotional experience and educational value, which provides a refined and procedural theoretical method for the study of tourism experience.

In recent years, her research on tourists’ spatio-temporal behavior has gradually shifted from traditional empirical research methods to experimental research methods. In exploring the virtual simulation and experimental design methods of human land relationship in tourism context, it has been at the forefront of the research field of tourism behavior at home and abroad, and has made a useful attempt and exploration to promote the development of tourism experimental research theory and method; It has made a pioneering contribution to promoting tourism from the description of “what is” to “what if”.