Visitors motivation and attitudes toward butterfly trading as souvenirs at Bantimurung bulusaraung National Park in Indonesia

Abstract

Transformation of the tourism industry into industrial and economic sectors triggers other sectors to grow, for instance, souvenir industry. Increasing number of visitors, however, escalates the demand for souvenirs from local and natural materials, which leads to resource degradation. The impact of tourism at Bantimurung Nature Recreation Park (NRP) to the resource arises due to visitors heavily buy butterfly souvenirs. The utilization of butterflies as material for souvenirs escalates their exploitation. It occurs to not only unprotected but also protected butterflies. Visitors as main actors affect the tourism sustainability and butterflys ecosystem. Thus, it is crucial for the Park to establish visitor management to secure tourism including butterfly-trading activities to give social and economic benefits but still maintain environmental sustainability and butterfly ecosystem. This research has four objectives

1) to identify visitors motivation

2) to figure out deontological status, law obedience, political action, and environmentally attitudes of visitors

3) to measure souvenir expenditure of visitors and their perception and preference to butterfly souvenirs

4) to enlighten correlation among those variables. Data collection for the study was conducted for one month, in October 2017, at Bantimurung NRP, Babul National Park (NP), South Sulawesi Province, Indonesia using on-site survey, observation, and face-to-face interview. The data from 455 respondents were analyzed using factor analysis, correlation method, and logistic regression. The result showed that visitors motivation divided into five groups

challenge and freedom, nature tour, escape from routine, social relationship, and family relationship group. Visitors had high deontological status, law obedience, political action, and environmentally attitude. The visitors perceived highly to the attributes of souvenirs and also had a high preference for the butterfly souvenirs which have conservation attributes. There was a significant correlation among variables of motivation to visit, deontological status, law obedience, political action, and environmentally attitude and perceived and preference of butterfly souvenirs attributes. Repeated visits and characteristics of butterfly such as display quality, value quality, and conservative attribute were found to influence the demand for butterfly souvenirs. This study enlightened how national park visitors motivation and their attitudes could affect souvenir-purchasing behavior. The result of this study can be of use for developing visitor management and ecotourism policies in National Parks in Indonesia.