Airline's roles for for supporting sustainable tourism development: a case study of Thailand

Abstract

The main objective of this study aims to develop the role of Airline in supporting sustainable tourism development (STD). The specific objectives are: 1) to evaluate current performance of the airline in supporting STD 2) to analyze the factor of passenger’s awareness to STD, passenger’s willingness to supporting STD, passenger’s expectation to STD performance of airline and passenger’s perception to STD performance of airline 3) to compare the difference between passenger’s expectation to STD performance of airline and passenger’s perception to STD performance of airline and to assess the influence of passenger’s awareness to STD, passenger’s willingness to support STD, passenger’s expectation to STD performance of airline, and passenger’s perception to STD performance of airline on the passenger’s performance in supporting STD. 4) to analyze awareness and willingness of airline administration in supporting STD.

The research is conducted in quantitative and qualitative approach. For the quantitative approach, data was collected through questionnaire with 400 samples from tourists who travelled to Thailand and tourists who travelled within domestic in eight designated airports of Thailand. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) is used to analyze variables with descriptive statistics such as frequency distribution, percentage and standard deviation of variables. Also, inferential statistics are also used to test the research hypotheses with Independent Sample t-test, and Multiple Regression Analysis. LISREL (Linear Structural Relations) program is used to examine the confirmatory factor analysis of latent variables. For qualitative approach, data was collected by in-depth interview of the Airline Administration and Tourism Expert. Content analysis was used to analyze the quantitative data.

The results of this research found that the current performance of passenger for supporting STD is in the high level, while the airline administration declared that they have performed well to support the tourism in all three aspects; economic, socio-cultural and environmental. The confirmatory factor analysis was used to examine the factor of four latent variables; passenger’s awareness to STD, passenger’s willingness to support STD, passenger’s expectation to STD performance of airline and passenger’s perception to STD performance of airline which have the result of model fit for all variables except passenger’s awareness to STD. The multiple regression analysis was conducted to analyze the influence of all four variables on the passenger’s performance to STD. The result showed that the passenger’s perception to STD performance of airline has the most influence on passenger’s performance to STD followed by passenger’s willingness to support STD, while the passenger’s expectation to STD performance of airline has opposite effect direction to the performance. The passenger’s awareness to STD influence passenger’s performance to STD statistical insignificant. This research also examined the difference between passenger’s expectation to STD performance of airline and passenger’s perception to STD performance of airline. The result found that the expectation was in the highest level, while the perception was in the moderate level with statistical significant. The content analysis also found that airline image, supporting activity option and airfare were the influent factor for passenger performance.

According to the mode of transport, business airline is the main transport which carry the great number of tourists to the destination. The contribution of this research provides the model for the business airline to adopt their policy to support the tourism. In this research, there are some recommendation for the airline administration to apply in their policy.