Factors Influencing Local Community for Domestic Tourism

This case study is about analyzing the factors that influence the decision making of local residents to domestic tourism in Jordan. The main push and pull factors influencing tourists decisions are summarized as the analysis of social, personal, psyological factors influencing the decision making of local Jordanian tourists to travel to different types of tourism destinations with different attributes like willingness, income, age, gender, seeking relaxation, easy access, gaining knowledge, time, religious and visiting relatives and friends. An electronic questionnaire was developed in all the Jordanian cities in June 2018 we took a sample of 10 persons from each city, and we found that the pull factors has more effects on local residents than the push factors, also the approximate income of the locals and their leisure time has more effect on domestic tourism and it prevent them from visiting tourism attractions and to learn more about it, also relaxation, recreation, entertainment, other activities and events are the most influencing on domestic tourism, moreover we found that local community in Jordan do not have a general background and knowledge about tourism attractions in Jordan and the importance of tourism in improving the economic situation and the elimination of unemployment.

Keywords:

Jordanian residents, decision making, tourism in Jordan, pull and push factors.

Introduction

United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) defines tourism as follows:

Tourism is a social, cultural and economic phenomenon which entails the movement of people to countries or places outside their usual environment for personal or business/professional purposes. These people are called visitors (which may be either tourists or excursionists; residents or non-residents) and tourism has to do with their activities, some of which imply tourism expenditure (united nations world tourism organization, 2008).

I define the domestic tourism as, the movement of the all local residents regardless to their nationality for any tourism purposes such as recreation, accommodation, entertainment and any other personnel objectives and spending money within the limits of ethics and preservation of the environment. Tourism is one of the most important industries that affect the force of the economics of services in the twentieth century. These three industries are: the telecommunications industry, the information technology industry, and the tourism industry. Tourism industry is important because it is the fastest and the biggest regarding its growth process. These facts bring to Jordan many challenges in order to respond to the Tourism market. As a result, it requires more effort to achieve a real touristic improvement that is equal to tourism attraction in Jordan. The tourism industry is considered as one of the fastest growing and development sectors at an international level. This is as a result of its ability to generate employment opportunities, contribute to the gross domestic product, and provide hard currency. Many international reports issued by the World Tourism Organization (WTO) by the United Nations, indicate the increase of the international tourism growth. However, this was despite the exposure of the world to various economic crises. The number of tourists reached 25 million in 1950, 527 million tourists in 1995, and 1138 million tourists in 2014. Also, the income also increased dramatically as a result of the international tourism expenditure, and it reached 1245 billion US dollars in 2014. The World Tourism Organization predicts that the number of international tourist arrivals will reach about 1.6 billion tourists by 2020 (annual report, 2014).Tourism is a complex set of industries including recreation, accommodation, entertainment, food and beverage services, transportation, and travel services. It include domestic, inbound, and outbound travel. And in this research I will focus on domestic tourism and local residents motivations to visit attractions in their own country and what prevent locals from visiting tourism attractions.

This study shows the importance of the tourism sector in Jordan, which forms the backbone of the national economy by 14.7% of the income of Jordan (the central bank, 2013).

Domestic tourism provides support to tourism operators in several sectors of industry performance:

Seasonality: An effective domestic tourism industry can generate visitors spending in slower shoulder and off season months.

Regional spread: Domestic visitors can provide a greater level of spending in rising regions, i.e. smaller or less developed areas of tourism.

Increase spending domestically: The domestic tourism offering can motivate Jordanian residents to holiday in Jordan rather than traveling to other countries.

Objectives

• The authorities responsibility of introducing tourism attractions to the local community, preserving them and developing them.
• Providing tourism infrastructure by identifying the concerns of the local community.
• Improving economic situation by developing domestic tourism.
• Reducing unemployment and seasonality.
• Raising local communities’ awareness of tourism importance.

The problem of the study

The problem of this study that is the role played by authorities of domestic tourism is still limited in Jordan, and this means that domestic tourism contribution in Jordan tourism is also still limited. In the past decade, the domestic tourism contribution in the Kingdom was almost 7% out of the total tourist activities. Therefore, this requires the need to double the public and private sectors efforts to expand the contribution of tourism media in stimulating and refreshing domestic tourism to support the tourism activity in Jordan. In addition to this, we can add the weakness of the motivations and benefits needed to enhance domestic tourism. From analyzing the national strategy which was set for the development of Jordan's tourism sector for the years 2011-2015, it has been concluded that this strategy is empty of any kind of the development of the Tourism media that deals with the domestic tourism. Furthermore, this indicates the importance of reviewing this strategy to develop and support the concept of appropriate tourism media. This is done through the distinctive tourism media and developing educational levels about tourism by teaching them in schools and universities. Moreover, these difficulties are linked to these constraints weakness of cultural awareness toward the value of these sites and tourist attractions.

Literature review

Previous studies shows that ‘Tourism’ has not been confined to general definition because different aspects of tourism generate various standpoints. It is widely accepted practice to put tourism in international or domestic contexts the major findings of this case study in Saudi Arabia were push factors positively and strongly related to pull factors and the only significant correlation existed between pull motivations and gender (bogari & bakor, university of hudderfieled, 2002). Domestic tourism involves travel of people within their own borders for the purpose of pleasure or leisure. And in other study for Sue Yuan and Cary McDonald the results indicates that local residents these four countries (France, Japan, United kingdom and West Germany) travel to satisfy ( push factors) such as novelty and prestige and pulled by the factors of cost, culture, willingness and history (Yuan & mcdonald, 1990), In our context, remaining consistent with established understanding, ‘domestic tourism’ is travel within Jordan, in my case study I found that every country differs from others and the factors influencing tourists decisions depends on the local residents.

Limitations and recommendations for future research

• This study has several limitations that need to be addressed in future research. First of all, the study variables were captured from self-reported measures and therefore self-report bias cannot be ruled out.
• Second, the sample drawn for this study is small. Small sample size can limit the sample representing.
• Future studies can also study the moderate effect of other variables like people’s personality and attitude , acquired level of information, health benefits awareness etc
• This study may be replicated with bigger representative samples to the population of country to further validate and accurate findings of present study.
• There are hundreds of factors that influencing locals for domestic tourism so we cannot cover them all in one research.
• The economic limitations, and lack of equipments of this study.

Theoretical background

This study identifies the importance of push and pulls factors in influencing travel motivations and decision it also seeks to establish whether one of them is more important than the others. Also within the push and pull factors, the study tries to find the elements that are more important for travel motivation. The research model showing proposed mutual relations among different variables is shown in this figure (baniya, 2016).

Figure 1: the research model

Therefore, the study has proposed:

Hypothesis 1: All the factors of pull motives are important to domestic travellers.

Hypothesis 2: All the factors of push motives are important to domestic travellers.

Hypothesis 3: there is a significant relationship between income and ability to visit tourism attractions.

Hypothesis 4: Pull motives are significantly more important than push motives for domestic travel motivation.

Sample and procedure

One hundred and twenty questionnaires were distributed to the people who were involved in domestic travel activities within past two months. The domestic travel activity was defined as traveling to various places within the country to stay away at least for a night. Altogether, 120 questionnaires were returned. 43 percent of the Respondents earn above 600 JOD in monthly basis and remaining below 600 JOD. 55 percent respondents of the study were female. Approximately 59 percent respondents were of age 21 to 30 years, 35 percent were in the age group of below 21 and the remaining respondents were above 30 years old. This may be indicative that younger generation, who are more informed, connected and technology savvy are more involved in domestic tourism. Age factor was not used as control variable in this study, the respondents were chosen as per their engagement in domestic travel activities within past two months (baniya, 2016).

Results

First of all, we found that money and time had the most effects on peoples decision weather not to visit tourism attractions in Jordan, we can also say It is because of the economic situation in the area, so people work hard to collect money and secure their basic needs and they do not think about visiting places outside their usual environment. Also they do not have enough knowledge about tourism attractions this is because individuals have not been educated about this since childhood and our weak educational system in tourism. Moreover, in Jordan we do not have enough infrastructures to provide easy access to the residents.

In our questionnaire we also asked people about the factors that led to the lack of knowledge about tourism attractions, and the results was close about the different factors which means that all of them impacts the knowledge and these factors respectively are marketing efforts, weakness of tourism ministry and the Jordanian tourism board these reasons can be attributed to the weak tourism planning by competent authorities.

According to the results we found that the Jordanian residents main motive is seeking relaxation and recreation entertainment and the events in a destination is also an important factor, in addition to this we found that local residents in Jordan do not give attention for gaining knowledge and enhancing relations and religious purposes, maybe because their educational level, cultural background and community upbringings.

Conclusion and Recommendations

A tourist’s decision-making process is a complex, multi-faceted course influenced by different internal and external factors, individuals attitudes can change over time and vary between different communities and countries, also there are a number of factors that cannot be manipulated or controlled. (snyman, 2014)

• Authorities, government, NGOs and private sectors need to raise awareness relating to domestic tourism, they can play an important role through tourism awareness in communities.
• There must be a clear, structured process of setting and managing expectations prior to domestic tourism starting in this area, as well as through the operational phases.
• It is not only important to maximize benefits to communities; there is a need to minimize costs.
• Education is important and has been shown in influence attitudes, improved educational infrastructure (e.g. Scholarship programs) in rural areas.
• Managing residents expectations, through understanding members attitudes.
• Future studies must focus on building tourism infrastructure specially in transportation sector so locals can join tourism activities easily, so transporation sector plays a major role in access to tourism attractions and domestic tourism as a whole.