VISITORS GROUP ALLIGNMENT USING TRAVEL MOTIVATION SEGMENTATION MALAYSIAN

NATIONAL ELEPHANT CONSERVATION CENTRE

Abdullah Mohd and Suziana Hassan

World Ecotourism Conference 2010

8 – 10 July 2010, Kuala Lumpur

• Nature tourism Malaysian’s vast natural areas and recreational activities.

• Tourists are more aware to the well-being of nature resources and retained much of their environmental integrity the natural environment conservation, local community, and economical independence.

• 3 criteria of ecotourism a nature element, an educational or learning component, and a requirement of sustainability of tourism Blamey (1997, 2001).

• Tourist travel motivations

• Alignment upon the environmental settings, recreational products and tolerance level

• Specifics services.

• People are homogenous sub-groups according to their specific attitudes, behaviours and preferences.

PREVIOUS STUDIES

• Study by Rosmalina & Abdullah (2005) in Taman Negara using MDA found that there are 2 main groups of ecotourists:

1. Hard ecotourists group rustic behaviour and dedicated ecotourists group

2. Soft ecotourists group casual and convenient/comfortable, large members

REASONS OF STUDY

• Due to demand to focus on ‘non-consumptive’ uses of wildlife

• Include less disturbance to nature that involve observation and photography, which are intended to have little or no deliberate interference with the focal species

• In Malaysia, Kuala Gandah National Elephant Conservation Centre (KGNECC) is the only national conservation centre for the Asian elephant and promotes wildlife tourism experience to the public closely.

• A large proportion of tourists in this centre might host conflicts among public and park conservation practice.

• However, the issues can be mitigated by understanding the travel motivation of the tourist to give attention on needs of different target groups in tourism destination

Faculty of Forestry

MAP OF PEN. MALAYSIA

THE STUDY AREA

• KGNECC, Lanchang, Pahang, Malaysia. KGNECC is located in the Krau Wildlife Reserve (KWR). It was established in 1923 as the Krau Game Reserve to protect wildlife species.

• 5.8 hectares of Krau WR reserve established in 1989. This centre is located approximately 150 km northeast of Kuala Lumpur.

• KGNECC is a home for several Asian elephants and some of them that are orphaned baby.

KUALA GANDA ELEPHANT CONSERVATION CENTRE

THE SURVEY• A survey of 401 visitors 2008 at Kuala Gandah

Elephant Management Centre, Pahang.• The survey is to identify the various experience

visitors sought include: - nature enjoyment, - educational rewarding, - wildlife tourism and - elephant conservation activities

• Multiple Discriminant Analysis used to segmentize and predict different motivation category of ecotourists using social-demographics and trip characteristics variables

THE ANALYSIS

• Descriptive analyses such as frequency, mean, and relative percentages was used for the socio-demographics data. In order to identify the different groupings of individuals based on motivations,

• Multiple Discriminant Analysis (MDA) was used to explore the discriminating strength of discriminator variables in differentiating the four nature-tourists segment.

• Discriminant functions were used to determine either the respondents belong to the Ecotourist, Nature Escapist, Comfortable Naturalist, or Passive Player tourists groups as identified their self-reported answers.

• Analyses of variance (ANOVA) with the LSD post hoc tests were used to compare the means of various continuous dependent variables for the nature tourists groups.

• The centroids for the nature-tourist group the four nature-tourist groups were found to be diffrentiated from one another

• The results of the segmentation analysis (MDA) showed that 64.1% of the original cases were classified, 60.8% cross-validated grouped cases correctly classified.

THE FINDINGS

• The findings indicated that tourists visiting KGNECC are heterogeneous and classified into four categories ecotourists, nature escapist, comfortable naturalist, and passive player.

• Socio-demographic backgrounds and travel characteristics are essential management information

• Psychographic information useful tool used to identify significant characteristics of the nature-tourist groups.

• Nature-tourist’ centroid showed that the tourist diffrentiate among each other based on their travel motivation, socio background factor, and travel party.

• The ecotourists have clear and distinct travel motivations, and possess all four motivation dimension of ecotourists and quite substantially different from the other groups’ traveler.

• Ecotourists showed higher means rating as compared to other nature-tourist groups towards all of the four motivation items. Ecotourists and nature escapists do differs from each other in related to their travel motivation for relax and leisure, experience and adventure, and knowledge and learning.

• However, both of them showed similarity in terms of ego-enhancement motivation. In most situations, nature escapists and comfortable naturalist showed medium rates of mean motivations, meanwhile, comfortable naturalists and passive players had connection each other since statistical analyses revealed that there are no significant differences in terms of relaxation and leisure, and knowledge and learning.

TYPES OF NATURE TOURISTS

• Tourists visiting KGNECC are heterogeneous and could be classified into four categories,

1. ecotourists, 2. nature escapist, 3. comfortable naturalist and 4. passive player.

• The socio-demographic backgrounds and travel attributes are essential elements

• Psychographic-based analysis by linking environmental setting to specific travel motivation attributes and significant characteristics of the tourist groups presence in natural areas.

CONCLUSIONS• Overall, the ecotourists is ‘hard ecotourist’,

while nature escapists and comfortable naturalists as ‘moderate ecotourist’ and passive players in ‘soft ecotourist’.

• Understanding tourists’ motivations for participating in nature tourism can ultimately help park manager effectively understand tolerance level, design recreational use, mgt. zoning and market their product lines and produce quality experience.

Discriminator Variables

Structure MatrixStandardized Canonical Discriminant

Function Coefficients

1 2 3 1 2 3

Adventure 0.831* -0.177 0.335 0.881 0.563 0.569

Relaxation 0.517* -0.322 0.217 0.420 -0.210 0.067

Knowledge 0.596* -0.318 0.040 0.277 -0.140 -0.846

Age -0.026 0.676* 0.253 0.119 0.848 0.052

Ego-enhancement

0.336 -0.510* 0.380 -0.546 -0.775 0.591

Income -0.194 0.120 0.692* -0.291 -0.107 0.771

Travel Party -0.158 -0.025 0.183* -0.103 0.086 0.315

Types of Tourist

Function

1 2

Ecotourist 0.826 -0.210

Nature Escapist -0.036 -0.014

Comfortable Naturalist -0.306 0.905

Passive Player -1.124 -0.531

Unstandardized canonical discriminant functions evaluated at group means

  TermTypes Of

Tourist (%)

Predicted Group Membership (%) Total

Ecotourist (N=129)

Nature Escapist (N=82)

Comfortable Naturalist

(N=96)

Passive Player (N=94)

  OriginalEcotourist (N=137)

73.7 6.6 10.9 8.8 100

 Nature Escapist (N=110)

16.4 45.5 20.0 18.2 100

 Comfortable Naturalist (N=78)

7.7 15.4 66.7 10.3 100

 Passive Player (N=76)

5.3 14.5 9.2 71.1 100

Cross-validation

Ecotourist 73.0 7.3 10.9 8.8 100

Nature Escapist

19.1 40.0 20.9 20.0 100

Comfortable Naturalist

7.7 16.7 61.5 14.1 100

Passive Player

5.3 15.8 10.5 68.4 100

a. Cross validation is done only for those cases in the analysis. In cross validation, each case is classified by the functions derived from all cases other than that case.

b.64.1% of original grouped cases correctly classified.

c.60.8% of cross-validated grouped cases correctly classified.

Motivations1

Tourist Segment2

F P

EcotouristNature escapist

Comfortable Naturalist

Passive Player

3Relaxation and Leisure(α=0.600)

3.62a 3.44b 2.99c 3.04c 62.11 0.01

Experience and Adventure(α=0.632)

4.28a 3.91b 3.51c 3.45d 127.33

0.01

Knowledge and Learning(α=0.752)

4.38a 3.83b 3.63c 3.58c 50.73 0.01

Ego-enhancement(α=0.811)

4.46a 4.37a 3.43b 3.92c 48.91 0.01

1 Represents the ratings of travel motivation among four nature-tourists groups on a 5-point scale, 1=‘strongly disagree’, 2=‘disagree’, 3=‘neutral’, 4=‘agree’, and 5=‘strongly agree’

2All cell entries are means and means with different superscripts across the rows differ significantly at p<0.05. LSD was used for the post hoc test

a Interpreting the superscript: items with different superscript indicate significant differences at P=0.05

3Example to interpret the superscript: there is a significant different in the means of the ecotourist group and nature escapist group at p<0.05. The means of the comfortable naturalist and the passive player groups did not differ significantly at 0.05.