Bangladeshi Tourists’ Attitude towards their Economic Responsibility

Abstract

Responsible Tourism (RT) is taking responsibility for making tourism more sustainable. Ensuring economic responsibility (ER) of Responsible Tourism Management (RTM) from tourists’ part whilst developing and managing a destination is potentially less harmful than continuing to manage it in an unchecked manner. Moreover, domestic tourism market can play a noteworthy part for practicing ER thus eventually will ensure economic sustainability of a destination. However, worldwide only a few studies partially tried to find out domestic tourists’ attitudes towards ER. Moreover, they are principally missing in case of developing countries where the domestic tourism market is more significant than international market. Besides, in Bangladesh, no study exists yet that exclusively tried to discover the Bangladeshi tourists’ attitudes towards ER component of RTM. So, this research was a step to fulfill the recognized gaps, as well as, an initiative to append the empirical findings to the existing RTM literature. After conducting an extensive literature review, this study followed both exploratory (in-depth interview) and single cross-sectional descriptive research design (survey method) to conduct it. Further, this study used Descriptive statistics (Frequency distribution analysis) and multivariate dependence data analysis technique (Multiple Regression analysis) to analyze the data collected from the 385 sample respondents through stratified random sampling. Based on the findings, the present study supports that, Bangladeshi tourists have positive attitudes to the ER of RTM however scopes are still available to enhance it further. This study also suggests including tourists’ socio-demographic characteristics whilst measuring their attitudes, as their attitudes considerably vary as a result of variation in their socio-demographic characteristics. With the support of and reference to this study, the Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) can work on the ER components of RTM to enhance the positive attitudes of Bangladeshi tourists towards RT practices at Cox’s Bazar (CB), Bangladesh. Moreover, the frameworks of this study also useful to study similar subject areas at other destinations in Bangladesh. This study on CB, Bangladesh also contributes to the RTM literature and minimizes the known literature gap for developing countries.

Keywords: Responsible Tourism, Responsible Tourism Management, Domestic Tourism, Domestic Tourists, Economic Responsibility, Attitude, and Cox’s Bazar