Tourism Marketing for Sustainable Development in Phayao Province, Thailand

Abstract

Phayao is one of the northern provinces in Thailand. It has variety and unique geographical and cultural tourist attractions with few travellers' knowledge of this fact. In 2011, the province came up with such vision intended to develop tourism under the programme "Safety Agriculture and Sustainable Tourism". The local government created a great deal of tourism plans in order to support tourism activities. However, the results were not successful because those tourism plans lacked tourism marketing understanding. The purpose of this research is to develop the better understanding of tourism marketing in term of sustainable tourism development in Phayao province. Mixed methods of both qualitative and quantitative methods were employed as research methodology. Questionnaire surveys were conducted with 400 samples, which were Thai tourists. Furthermore, focus group techniques were employed with 10 experts from related fields, namely tourism, marketing, and policy making fields (from both government and private sectors). The findings of this research are focusing on three major issues: 1) Thai tourist behaviour, 2) tourism marketing mixture in Phayao province, 3) developing of tourism marketing in Phayao province. According to the Thai tourist behaviour, the results revealed the information about the tourists in the following aspects: 1) length of stay (1 day), 2) travelling cost (1700 baht), 3) activities (health tourism and soft adventure), 4) accommodation (hotel), 5) tourism resource (nature and culture). In addition tourism marketing in Phayao province should be developed as follows: 1) planning, 2) product and service development, 3) tourism network, 4) human resource development, 5) price, 6) friend-to-friend, 7) government cooperation.