A Study on Cultural Context Perception in Huizhou Cultural and Ecological Reserve Based on Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

Abstract

Tourists’ environmental perception is the decisive factor of cultural tourism experience. Although this topic research is relatively common, there are essential differences between different theme tourism areas. This study selects the national Huizhou Cultural and Ecological Reserve in China as the research object, which has a diverse cultural field, a wide range of researchable levels, and research theoretical support, and focuses on the evaluation of tourists’ environmental perceptions of cultural-themed tourism reserves. The research is in line with the basic consensus of the international community on the relationship between NRM conservation and sustainable development and has a positive significance for cultural conservation. In this study, nine indicators were constructed from the three dimensions of cultural perception, environmental perception, and emotional perception, including mental pleasure, experience comfort, audiovisual richness, cultural awareness, cultural diversity, cultural influence, facilities completeness, environment tidiness, and travel convenience. Questionnaires (283) were distributed, 260 of which were valid. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and entropy method were used to study the cultural context perception of Huizhou Cultural Ecological Reserve. The Cronbach coefficient was 0.977, the KMO value was 0.953, and the validity was 91.87%. The research results show that, first, tourists’ perception level from high to low is cultural perception (0.351), environmental perception (0.349), and emotional perception (0.301). Secondly, the factors most strongly perceived by tourists are tourism convenience (0.129), cultural influence (0.126), cultural diversity (0.118), and facilities completeness (0.115). Thirdly, improving tourists’ spiritual pleasure, experience comfort, audiovisual richness, cultural recognition, and environmental cleanliness is conducive to promoting tourists’ perception and experience.