Identify the Satisfaction of Travel Destination Attributes on International Tourists’ Revisit Intention: Special Reference to Arugambay Tourism Zone

Abstract

International tourism market performs most prominent role in the economy of developed as well as developing countries including Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka entered to the international tourism market in 1960, presently tourism industry is considered as one of the major foreign currency earners in the local economy. However, as compared to the other South East Asian region, Sri Lanka has not yet tapped into its full potential in the global market. Hence, tourism industry should pay more attention to explore the reasons why people travel and what are the satisfaction level of each travel destination attributes and the re-visit of the tourists in order to increase the tourists’ arrivals, earnings and global market share and reduce the costs. Tourists’ satisfaction and revisit intention play an important role in marketing the travel destination attributes. Hence, understanding the revisit intention is one of the dominant issues because repeat visitors provide more revenue and minimize the cost. Usually, tourism industry requires high level of promotional costs. To reduce this promotional cost, it is necessity to identify the satisfaction level of the travel destination attributes for each destination and revisit intention of the international tourists. This assist to ascertain for tourism planners and marketers about the most and least important attributes in a destination in order to develop and maintain a better tourism destination by reducing the promotional costs. Therefore, the objective of this study was to identify the satisfaction of travel destination attributes on international tourists’ revisit intention in Arugambay tourism zone. International tourists, who visited Arugambay, were the target population of this study. Primary data was collected through the structured questionnaires by using simple random sampling procedure to select the sample size of 100. Non-parametric analysis was used to achieve the objective of this study. According to the results, respondents rated high weather/climate, opportunity for adventure, relaxation and tourists’ activities offered in the area as attributes that affected them the most in visiting the Arugambay zone. On the other hand, culture and transportation were rated as the least significant attributes that affected their visit