Research Progress and Methods on Western Camping Tourism, and Its Inspiration to China's Forest Tourism

Camping in Europe and America has been practiced for over 100 years, and the academic studies on camping tourism also have been doing for nearly 50 years. This paper firstly reviewed the development process of European and American camping tourism, then systematically sorted the concept of abroad camping tourism, and finally summarized the main areas, methods and trend of researches on the camping tourism. The study found out that firstly the Western researches focused on the camping organizations or institutions, campsite selectionplanningconstructionoperation and management, statistics of population in camping, and the motivation of camping. The research methods, such as the qualitative study while quantitatively dominant, the multivariate statistical analysis, and qualitative research with questionnaire survey have become the mainstream. Secondly, in most western countries and regions, the promotion by government was indispensable driving force for camping tourism. The relevant researches cover paying high attentions to the relation between camping tourism and environment, building multiple methods to understand the psychological demands of the campers, and increasing the utilization efficiency of campsite and participation degree of public camping. Finally camping tourism is an important content and new trend of forest tourism in China; in the future, we should make further researches on contradiction between camping tourism activities and forest ecological environment and how to reduce the ecological negative impact in tourism planning practice. Moreover, how to efficiently develop camping tourism in the forest along with the changes of the national forest right and forestry management system will become the era issue.