Abstract:

The spatial structure of tourism system is an important content of tourism geography and it is very significant to optimize the spatial structure for a region to realize sustainable tourism development. Taking Hubei Wuling Mountain Area as a study case, the article analyzed the tourismsystem spatial structure of the area from aspects of tourism resources, tourist markets and tourist transportations. The results showed that in the area, the spatial distribution of tourism resources was significantly obvious，and the important tourism resources and Agrade scenic spots mainly distributed around Lichuan, Enshi and Badong and along traffic arteries such as the railways, highways and rivers, with more advantages in the northern than in the southern. As for tourist markets, the domestic were mainly concentrated on nearest neighbor regions, especially within Hubei Province, and the overseas were relatively dispersed, but most of overseas tourists were from U.S.A.. In the aspect of tourist distributing centers, the majority of receptive tourists and tourism revenues were mainly come out of such counties/cities as Enshi, Badong, Lichuan and Changyang, and according to the tourist distributing degree, Enshi was defined as the first tourist distributing center, while Badong, Lichuan and Changyang as the second. In terms of accessibility, the accessibility of Agrade scenic spots, as a whole, was not good, with an average reachable time of 42.82 minutes, and generally the accessibility of the northern counties/cities was better than that of the southern ones. To optimize the spatial structure of tourism system, we suggest that the Hubei Wuling Mountain Area should make great efforts to forge famous brands of tourist products, to deeply explore the value of cultural tourism resources, to develop the domestic and overseas tourist markets, to strengthen the function of tourist distributing centers, and to establish the barrierfree tourism network composed of three important tourist cities Enshi, Yichang and Zhangjiajie by integrating the tourism resources of the whole Wuling Mountain Area (involving three provincial regions of Hubei, Hunan and Chongqing