Sustainable Tourism: Prospects and Challenges of Kuakata Sea Beach

Abstract

Sustainable Tourism Development (STD) is a major goal for the tourism industry. Lack of sustainable tourism understanding is a challenge for implementing sustainable tourism development. The basic principles of sustainable tourism consist of economic, environmental and socio-cultural dimensions. It is apparent that different individuals have different perspectives on sustainable tourism development. Divergent perspectives among tourism stakeholders cause unanticipated conflicts while promoting sustainable tourism destinations. Before applying sustainable tourism concepts, it is important to know what major stakeholders think and how they feel about them. This research addresses the highly vulnerable sea beach in Kuakata in Patuakhali district of Bangladesh as the study context. Kuakata is the second largest beach in Bangladesh and has forests like mangroves, which are very important for tourism. The existing literature about the perceptions of sustainable tourism development of different major stakeholder groups of the Kuakata is very limited. It is also unknown what kind of challenges Kuakata is currently facing in the implementation of sustainable tourism and what new prospects are being created. In order to fill research gaps, the aim of this thesis is to investigate what are the various prospects and challenges of sustainable tourism in Kuakata sea beach. In doing so, a mixed methods approach is used in this research to address the research aim and four objectives. In this research, it was used to produce quantitative data, the primary data set for achieving the first and second research objectives. Two distinct surveys were conducted: one of the tourists and another of the local residents. For both questionnaire surveys, the face-to-face interview method was selected for collecting data. In addition, qualitative methods used in this research consisted of semi-structured in-depth interviews with tourism business service providers, tour operators, government and non-government stakeholders. Factor Analysis, Mean Analysis, Independent Sample ‘t’ Test, and one-way between-groups analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to reach the first and second objectives. A judgmental sampling technique and thematic analysis was adopted to achieve the third and fourth objectives. Documents from a wide variety of sources were examined in order to add richness to the empirical data and to verify the participants' assertions.

From the tourist survey, five factors were extracted, namely: “Quality of Destination”, “Desirable Features”, “Condition of Supporting Service”, “Requisite Facilities”, and “Interest for STD”. The results of the Independent Sample “t” Test and One-Way ANOVA showed that there was no significant difference between the variables with respect to gender, age, and educational qualification, whereas the tourist’s house location from Kuakata sea beach and the monthly family income of the tourists made a significant difference in their perception towards sustainable tourism development. Five distinct factors are generated from the resident survey by the rotated component matrix, namely: "Perceived Negative Impacts", "Community Satisfaction and Interest towards STD", "Perceived Positive Impacts", "Welfare Increase", and "Perceived Social Costs". The results of the Independent Sample‘t’ test and One-Way ANOVA proved that for the perceptions of residents of STD at Kuakata sea beach in relation to the resident respondents’ demographic characteristics presented that there is a significant difference between the variables with respect to residents’ types, gender, age, residents’ house location from Kuakata sea beach, educational qualification and occupations. However, there is no significant difference between the perceptions of resident respondents with regard to monthly family income.