The complexity and great change of overall conditions for consumption and individual consumers provide new perspectives and methods for researching tourist buying decision behavior. Both domestic and overseas research on tourist buying decision behavior has given rise to the theories of consumer information processing and of decision-making. This paper first reviews the evolution of overseas comparative consumer decision-making theory; proposes three research prospects represented by digital platforms, cultural differences, and sustainable consumption; and describes the progress of online field experiments as a research method. In domestic tourism research, the focus is primarily on the transformation of marketing modes and consumer orientation. However, inadequate attention has been paid to the IHIP attributes of tourism and the development of domestic tourism consumption. The theory of consumer decision-making does not play an active role in tourism research. It is obviously difficult to apply systematic theories and framework to making world-class academic innovation. Therefore, the paper proposes to improve the framework of information processing and decision-making theory, given new phenomena in tourism. It aims at using the development of Chinese tourism to make better theoretical and practical contributions to tourism research.

At present, tourism enterprise management in China is widespread and continually being enriched, which requires corresponding theoretical research for guidance. This paper serves two purposes. First, this paper analyzes the current relationship between the theory and practice of tourism enterprise management in China. An analysis of articles on tourism enterprise management published in CSSCI journals from 1998 to 2018 reveals a downward trend in publication numbers in recent years, and the concentration, depth, and relevance of research topics are insufficient. Based on a text analysis of expert speeches at a special seminar on tourism enterprise management in 2018, this paper summarizes and highlights the frontier and hot topics. In making a comparative analysis with the results of a literature analysis, this paper finds that there have been problems of "disconnection" and "mismatch" between tourism enterprise management research and practical issues in China in recent years. Second, this paper proposes a "cross-level and cross-sectional" research framework of tourism enterprise management, which points out that contextualization is an important way to construct the above research framework. It further puts forward a four-dimensional framework of "mature theory, emerging theory, known phenomenon, and new phenomenon" to illustrate how the contextualization theory of tourism enterprise management is constructed. The theoretical contribution of this paper lies in sorting out the research on domestic tourism enterprise management comprehensively and systematically and providing a practice-oriented research guide for follow-up research. This paper also proposes a theoretical framework of tourism enterprise management and the construction of situational theory, which offers new concepts and directions for improving the current research paradigm of domestic tourism enterprise management. Such a framework is conducive to formulating new theoretical ideas and strategies for research on tourism enterprise management.

With the development of the concept of the experience economy at the end of the 20th century, experience has been an important economic offering after goods and services. The tourist experience has always been an important issue in tourism research and is regarded as the essence of tourism. This article takes Disneyland, a typical hedonic tourism product, as an example and uses grounded theory, such as open coding, axial coding, and selective coding, to discuss the emotional triggers in the tourist experience, various dimensions of tourist experience quality, and the functional process of the tourist experience. This paper found that: (1) the emotional triggers in the tourist experience mainly are environment, service encounter, interpersonal interaction, and activity participation; (2) the quality of the tourist experience is composed of three dimensions (attraction, fun and, enjoyment); and (3) the functional process of the tourist experience starts from different emotional triggers, which act on tourists through the sensory organs and consciousness. Because tourists differ in personality and number of visits, their emotional responses are of different valence and intensity, which leads to various individual experiences and different evaluations of the quality of the tourist experience. This paper pays particular attention to the antecedent variables of tourist experience quality and the functional process of the tourist experience. It is intended to provide better knowledge and more in-depth understanding of the tourist experience, which is conducive for tourism destination managers to design more attractive tourism products and bring about better tourist experiences.

The emergence of alliances in the MICE industry challenges the governance of these network-based organizations. The existing literature on alliances focuses on the discussion of the motivation and benefits of establishing them in the MICE industry. It is insufficient to address the governance issues, including the emergence of the informal power structure, integration of complementary resources, and value capture of alliance partners, once an alliance is established. The literature on alliance governance and the study of inter-organizational cooperative behavior are still relatively independent of each other. To fill these research gaps, this paper carries out an in-depth longitudinal case study of the Hangzhou Convention Industry Alliance to explore how alliance governance mechanisms affect alliance performance in the MICE industry. Three alliance governance mechanisms emerge from the case study: coordination-based lateral authority, boundary-spanner based resource integration, and public-private balance-based value appropriation. Furthermore, the case study analyses how these three mechanisms of alliance governance co-evolve with the collaborative behaviors of partners in the alliance, which evolve from co-working to co-innovation. It also demonstrates how alliance performance is influenced by this co-evolution process. This study proposes a theoretical framework of “alliance governance - collaborative behavior - alliance performance.” It broadens the horizons of research on alliance governance by incorporating the theory of organizational behavior into the literature. In doing so, this paper has important implications for the development and innovation of the MICE industry.

In the context of integrated development of culture and tourism, the establishment and development of the theory of aesthetic experience provide a fresh theoretical perspective for researchers to re-explore the tourism experience. This article first defines the theoretical content, features, and levels of aesthetic experience. Then, it reviews the theoretical origin of aesthetic experience, mentioning that the interdisciplinary theoretical basis of aesthetic experience includes the theory of subject-object integration, the Gestalt principle, and the place theory. Next, this study presents an overview of tourism research that involves the theory of aesthetic experience. It finds that the tourism research results regarding aesthetic experience mainly focus on three aspects: tourists’ aesthetic perception, tourists’ aesthetic emotion, and the aesthetic value of the tourist experience. Finally, in accordance with hierarchical levels of aesthetic experience, this study establishes a tourism research framework incorporating three levels of aesthetic experience—aesthetic sense, aesthetic emotion, and aesthetic spirit—and proposes the direction and prospect for researching tourism experience from the perspective of the aesthetic ecosystem.