Abstract

Ecotourism is a nature tourism that focuses on a protected area or area that contributes to the welfare of the local community and conservation and education for the community. Meanwhile, as much as 98.9 percent of the forest area under its management rights is still controlled by corporations and capital owners. While the rest which is no more than 1.1 percent of the area of ​​forest management rights is controlled by the community. Enhancing the role of forest areas, especially conservation forests, needs to be done to improve the quality of life of communities around the buffer zones. The purpose of this study is to identify service quality factors that influence customer satisfaction and interest in ecotourism visits in Saporkren, and formulate ecotourism marketing strategies in Saporkren. This is done to increase the number of ecotourism visitors in Saporkren, which of course will provide increased income for the community and improve the quality of life of the Saporkren people.

The population in this study were visitors from the Saporkren ecotourism. The sampling technique uses accidental sampling and purposive sampling. The selected respondents were tourists who were visiting Saporkren and were found by researchers and tourists who had visited Saporkren at least once in the past one year. Endogenous variables (Y) and (Z) in this study are consumer satisfaction and interest in return visits. Exogenous variables (X) in this study are tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. The data processing technique used in this study is Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) with LISREL 8.7 software.

Based on the results of the study, only three out of five service quality factors were identified that affected customer satisfaction, namely tangible, reliability, and assurance. And in this study, consumer satisfaction is proven to affect the interest in a repeat visit. After that, from the interviews and Focus Group Discussion (FGD), a strategy that could be implemented in ecotourism in Saporkren was formulated to explore potential tourism that could be exploited in addition to birdwatching for tangibles, and to train and certify tour guides in Saporkren for reliability and assurance.

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