Study on the sustainable ability of rural tourism in Guilin city

Guilin, a world famous tourism city with marvelous water and hills, attracts a large amount of tourists from both domestic and overseas every year based on her excellent natural landscapes. The total amount of tourists visited Guilin in 2012 was 32.926 millions, among those 1.824 millions were overseas. There are large scales of rural areas around Guilin city. They are rich in rural tourism resources. It is significant to develop rural tourism in Guilin, because it can enrich the items of Guilin tourism, it can lighten the burden of tourists to Lijiang River Tourist Attraction in Guilin, it can help the local people to earn more money and to promote Guilin tour industry to a higher position. Using the Delphi method and the analytical hierarchy process, the sustainable ability of Guilin rural tourism is studied in this paper by setting a set of 20 indicators with four dimensions after three rounds of discussions by the panel members. The result shows that the sustainable ability of rural tourism in Guilin district is 84.244% at present, which is on the "almost sustainable development" level. According to the factors that affect the sustainable development of Guilin rural tourism, the author announced some countermeasures to promote Guilin rural tourism development, such as to make a total rural tourism plan for its development, to exploit rural tourism products in diversity, to improve and perfect the administrating system, to improve the environmental sanitations in rural areas and to pay more attentions to educate and to train the people who are engaged in rural tourism service and management.