Green tourism perception and motivation: a study of demestic market in Thailand

Abstract

Green tourism is emerging as a significant global market trend towards a new lifestyle of people who are concerned with the environmental issues, such as global warming. Hence, this study aims to propose the recent survey evidence on the perceptions and motivations of Thai tourists towards green tourism by using Samut Songkram and Phang-Hga, two of the most famous provinces in Thailand, as a comparative case studies to examine the shades of green tourist. These communities are outstandingly well established in terms of maintaining sustainable tourism development as part of green tourism product aspect. The research is aimed to analyze the perception and motivation of 400Thai green tourists by using both quantitative and qualitative methods. It is designed to determine the consumers’ perspectives and it focuses on the possibility to promote green tourism project as part of the government campaign for developing sustainable tourism of domestic market. The research study showed that Thai green tourists have various understandings and applications of being “green”. This reflects the diversity between consumers in terms of their perception, motivation and actions towards the environment in general. Hence, the proposed study is to provide an assessment of the Thai green tourists’ perceptions and motivations from the tourists’ current activities and also provide the evaluation of the environmental-riendliness from the tourists experience by using sample size representing Thailand aspect. The formulation of guidelines for the appropriate behaviors of a green tourist, and the possibility in promoting Thai green tourist campaign for sustainable tourism development are illustrated in this research.The influential factors on the decision making process of tourists are classified into ‘Push and Pull factors’. In the case of Thai ourists, and comparing Push and Pull factor, the mean value of Push factor is slightly different from Pull factor. This can be implied that Thai tourist is influenced more by the external factors especially the ones that support their own desires while making decision. It is different from international tourist results which push factors is clearly higher than pull factor, indicating that external factors do not have much influence on their decision making when they go travelling. The results were illustrated to support the internal and external determinant relationship among channel of the received green tourism information, tourist behavior, perception and shade of green tourist. With respect to a received information channel, the green tourism information is delivered to green tourist by friends and relatives, Television, radio, internet, Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) website with different behavior pattern as receiver as well as perception aspect expect tour operators channel which can be created the same pattern of green tourist behavior. Therefore, green tourist behavior can be affected by tour operator easier than others. It could be suggested that the decision making process of green tourists is not only to consider the development of green products, but it should also be concerned with the distribution of information on green tourism, informing the way to preserve nature and environment. From the study, providing the information from travel agencies or being informed by relatives or peers sharing the experience on green tourism would strengthen the awareness and build-up a sense of environmental-friendly traveling.It is advisable to make green tourism product more tangible such as providing a clear definition of green tourism products, a clear green product identity, image and personality of green tourist. In fact from the study, the unclear perception of green tourists is resulted from the fact that green tourism is intangible in the consumer perception. Therefore providing the information about green issues to increase the green awareness to tourists is required. For the future research, the further emphasis of shade of green tourist behavior from different segments is recommended. Although this study has identified some interesting findings, there are limitations as these data as the majority of the information was captured from respondents at Phang-Nga and Samut SongKram in Thailand. Therefore, it is not necessarily an indicative of all tourists.