The travel patterns and travel distance of tourists to national parks in China

This is a case study with data from Jiuzhaigou and other national parks in China. It was revealed that the travel distance of tourists to a destination is related to their demographic data such as age, occupation, education level, actual income, self‐perceived income level, landscape preference and tourist attitude; but not related to the tourist motivation. Perceived distance has the character of distance decay, and substitute distance is supposed to be related to travel distance. “Pareto Model” was proved to be the best‐fit model of Taylor's five types of distance decay model. Also, in this paper, the distance characteristics and uneven spatial structure of convergent travel behavior of tourists and related market background were studied by using different distance cumulative curves.