Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify the most important drivers for developing destination competitiveness of Bangladesh nature-based tourism by evaluating tourists’ perception. A nationwide structured questionnaire survey of total 432 Bangladeshi tourists is carried out by dividing the whole country into two parts for equal representation. Based on this data, a profile of the tourists is constructed before ranking of attributes from most important to least important on a five-point Likert scale. An Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) has been conducted finally to identify the most important factors from 24 selected attributes related to nature-based tourism of Bangladesh. The key findings indicate that seven attributes are more important to respondents than others as all these has average importance value more than 4 out of 5 while only two is least important. From the EFA of these attributes, supported by a parallel analysis, four major factors are extracted namely, tourism infrastructure; historical and cultural attractors; natural attractors; and communication facilities and lifestyle similarities. Thus, this study will help both policy makers to develop long term destination policy focusing on natural attractors and service providers to customize their services according to tourists’ expectation. Consequently, this paper conceptualizes the importance of focusing on specific sectors of tourism and the way of developing competitiveness of nature-based tourism of Bangladesh. However further studies can be conducted to match tourists’ evaluation of attributes on importance and performance and/or evaluating same perception from service providers rather than tourists.

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