Study on the safety cognition of cave tourism practitioners in China

Karst cave security is basic prerequisite and guarantee for normal development of cave tourism activities. Throughout the majority of domestic and foreign cave tourism safety accidents, most of them are due to tourism practitioners and visitors who are lack of safety cognition and short of tourism risk prevention ability. To improve the level of cave tourism safety management and reduce the probability of accident, it is of great importance to promote the tourism safety cognition for the tourists, tourism practitioners, cave tourism managers and the relevant administrative departments. As cave tourism practitioners directly face the tourists at a site, and they are "the first firewall" to the cave accident that might happen, it is hence important to study cave tourism safety cognition from the perspective of cave tourism practitioners. This paper selected 17 caves in China which have been opened to tourist as the research examples. Through on-the-spotinvestigation and entrusted investigation and by performing statistical, gray correlation and variance analyses to analyse cave tourism practitioners' safety cognition and their differences. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) Cave tourism practitioners' safety cognition degree is higher in the country. (2) There are some differences in the safety management cognition of cave tourism practitioners in our country. (3) There are some differences in safety cognition degree among cave tourism practitioners with different attributes.(4) There are some obvious differences in different caves of tourism practitioners' safety cognition degree. Based on these conclusions, we propose the following measures to improve the level of cave tourism safety management. They are strengthening safety education and training for cave tourism practitioners, improving the safety awareness enhancing safety management level at cave tourism scenic spots, strengthening the measure implementation, establishing and improving the safety control, early warning and rescue system of cave tourism and effectively guarantee tourism.