Abstract:Tourism environmental comfort (TEC) is a key factor for tourists to make travel decisions and choose trip patterns at the destination, which further affects the time span as well as the utility rate. Climate and environment are two major elements that affect TEC at an attraction area. While much research has been done on climatic comfort, little is found on the impacts of environmental factors. With increasing environmental pressure such as noise and air quality caused by over-crowding and heavy traffic, environmental factors have been found to have great effects on TEC at attraction areas in China. Being different from other studies, this paper tries to merge two environmental factors of air quality and noise into the evaluation system of TEC and focuses on the impacts of spatial and temporal variety on micro-TEC at a natural scenic area. In this study, the West Lake National Scenic Area in Hangzhou was selected as the study site, and five environmental parameters including temperature, humidity, CO2, CO and noise, were monitored and recorded at 6 typical spots (mountain area, lake area, downtown, suburb, tourist-concentrated area and traffic-busy area) at a proximate interval of half a month from November 2010 to October 2011. Two days were chosen for the monitoring each month, usually a week day in the second week of a month and a weekend day in the last week of the month. Daily time for monitoring was from 12:00 to 14:00 each day, which was the busy time for tourist visitation. All the data collected at the six spots were calculated with a newly developed model, and spatial and temporal variation were analyzed. As a result we found: (1) Five indicators monitoring in mountain and lake area are better than downtown, suburb, tourist-concentrated area and traffic-busy area. (2) Recorded data of either CO or CO2 density in the air was far from the uncomfortable benchmarks for all the six spots. So these two factors were not significant and omitted for consideration of TEC valuation. (3) Using the data of temperature, humidity and noise, a TEC evaluation model was developed and different degrees of TEC were classified for the study area; (4) The results suggested that there appears significant spatial and temporal variation of TEC in the study area. Mountain and lake areas enjoyed much better TEC than suburb, tourist-concentrated and traffic-busy areas, with their TEC indexes increasing from mountain (1.30), to lake area (1.66), downtown (1.82), suburb (2.02), tourist-concentrated area (2.47), and traffic-busy area (2.48). It seems that natural environments such as forest and water can provide better TEC at micro-scale. (5) TEC values at the six spots varied with time and places, with the maximum differences from mid-April to mid-May and the minimum from early January to late February. (6) Temporally, the period from early January to late February falls within the TEC range of uncomfortableness while the comfortable and fairly comfortable periods fall within both ranges from late February to mid-July and from late August to late November. (7) It is found that there could be a synergistic effect of humiture and noise. When humiture is within a comfort zone, frequent tourism activities cause noise increased and TEC decreased. When humiture is less comfortable, reduced tourism activities makes acoustic environment more comfortable.