System Dynamic Simulation of Online Customers for Cruise Travel: Based on the Customer Life Cycle Perspective

Cruise tourism is an emerging tourism industry. Under the current online consumer market, expanding the number of online customers is an important consideration for the sound development of cruise tourism, starting from the reality of cruise travel, integrating life cycle theory, demand theory, and network consumption behavior theory, defining the evolution model of customer life cycle, using system dynamics for simulation analysis to discover the dynamic changes in the number of cruise travel online customers in different life periods. The analysis of the simulation results found that at different stages of the life cycle evolution of cruise travel network customers, travel demand is comprehensively affected by various factors such as basic needs, novelty, offline experience, Internet word‐of‐mouth, and information quality. The number of potential customers first accelerates and then declines. The trend is flat, the number of waiting customers is normally distributed over time, and the number of existing customers and lost customers tends to stabilize after an accelerated increase. The simulation results with word‐of‐mouth factor as the test function show that the model has good robustness and sensitivity. The number of waiting customers is sensitive to changes in word‐of‐mouth impact factors, and the number of existing customers has not increased significantly. Finally, summarize the development strategies of cruise tourism from the perspective of life cycle: increase the promotion of cruise tourism network and expand the range of potential customers, highlight the characteristic orientation of cruise tourism differentiation, induce waiting for customers to pay online, improve the quality of cruise tourism experience and maintain existing customer loyalty, and optimize the quality of travel information on the online platform to attract lost customers to turn back.