Developing destination safety indicators and strategy for promoting tourists' safety confidence

Abstract

As safety and security issue is playing an important role to ensure a quality in tourism and is considering as a key factor in tourist’s decision-making process to select a destination, therefore the necessary improvement of safety and security must be considered and implemented. To provide safe and secured perception, a clear understanding of tourists' safety requirements, measures and concerns must be noticed. Then appropriate measures and strategies can be created to serve international tourists. Therefore, this study aims to develop and assess the destination safety indicators, and to formulate a strategy for promoting tourists’ safety confidence in Thailand. The specific objectives are as followings; 1) To explore the tourists’ awareness and perception toward incident risks and to examine their expectation and perception toward destination safety measures, 2) To construct the destination safety indicators, 3) To analyze factors influencing the importance and perception of destination safety, and 4) To develop a strategy for promoting tourists’ safety confidence by segment of tourists.

The mixed research method, which includes both quantitative and qualitative research methods, was employed to accomplish this study. For quantitative method, the target population was international tourists, who visited Thailand, originated from seven regions. The survey questionnaire was a main tool for collecting respondent’s data and was administered to 492 sets. The data were analyzed by descriptive statistics along with the exploratory factor analysis according to the research objectives. The key findings showed that international tourists had a slightly low level of awareness and a low level of perception toward incident risks with the focus on an overcharging by service provider attribute. While thier expectation and perception toward destination safety measures were moderate and high levels, respectively. The exploratory factor analysis revealed that only 28 important attributes were retained and distributed into five components; destination health/well-being and natural conditions (factor 1), destination emergency readiness (factor 2), destination infrastructure and security practices (factor 3), destination civil and political situations (factor 4), and destination tourism product and service price (factor 5), and considerably renamed as a destination safety, the analysis also showed that five major factors were extracted with cumulative percentage of variance explained at 68.68% with Eigen values of 11.727, 8.185, 1.608, 1.456 and 1.062 respectively.

The construction of destination safety indicators were then developed by using a set of indicators derived from the survey analysis of international tourists’ perspectives which ensured the indicators were reliable and relevant to the tourists. The findings exhibited that overall destination safety indicators in 2018 were at relatively high level with the focus on the overcharging by service provider indicator. Lastly, this study offered the proposed strategy for promoting tourists’ safety confidence, resulted from the confirmation and comparison of findings on each attribute and indicator, and was later called as a W-I-S-E-R strategy. The proposed strategy consisted of five dimensions; good health/well-being and natural conditions, good infrastructure and security practices, more desirable civil and political situations, effective tourism product and service pricing, and more emergency readiness. The strategy was also verified its appropriateness and accuracy by three related tourism stakeholders, employed a semi-structured interview of a qualitative method. The final W-I-S-E-R strategy, with the integration of proposed actions, and experts’ suggestions and comments, was proposed to promote tourists’ safety confidence in Thailand.