Market Segmentation in Laos Ecotourism Sites: a survey on visitors at Kuang Si Waterfall and Konglor Cave

Abstract

In Lao PDR, ecotourism business is a major source of acquiring foreign currency and thus, providing an opportunity for poverty reduction. The Lao government has recognized importance of building knowledge base on tourists characteristics and developing appropriate marketing strategy for sustainable tourism development, yet only handful of ecotourism studies has been carried out in the country.

This research conducted market segmentation of ecotourism in Lao PDR based on tourist motivation to help planners as well as marketers to understand tourist characteristics. This research also used tourist responsible attitude measure to investigate whether the segment of responsible tourists, who are considered as relatively high level of desirable contributors to both local communities and environment, are managerially useful targets for selective marketing. This approach addressed limitation of previous researches on responsible attitude based tourist segmentation that considered only environmental attitude of tourists.

To meet the objectives, this research used following methods and processes. Visitors to Kuang Si Waterfall and Konglor Cave, where community based ecotourism development project funded by the government were implemented were sampled as they were entering the sites on total 14 sampling days during May, October, and November in 2015. Sampling was carried out from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. according to the parks opening hours. After securing reliability and validity of the survey, randomly chosen respondents were asked to answer to self-administered questionnaire. A total of 591 completed questionnaires were obtained at the Kuang Si Waterfall site during the period, while 301 at the Konglor Cave site. With these data, the four segments of tourists were identified based on their scores of tourist responsible attitudes and motivations, and then the socio economic profiles of the segment groups were developed.

The results provided general understanding of tourist characteristics and showed that the segments defined by having different levels of tourist motivations and responsible attitudes are distinct segments of the population. Each segment differs in a range of socio demographic and travel-related characteristics requiring different destination programs.

Based on the result, it is concluded that segmentation based on tourist motivation and responsible attitude is useful for selective marketing approach aiming at attracting relatively more responsible tourists.