Sustainability constructs of mountain tourism development: the evaluation of stakeholders’ perception using SUS-TAS

Abstract

The success of sustainable tourism is inter-woven with the participation of different stakeholders in general and communities in particular. Participation becomes more important in the mountain ecosystems with a fragile resource base and limited capacities of the local people to accommodate rapid changes. The fundamental focus of this work is to measure the attitude of local communities concerning sustainable tourism development and assess the reliability and validity of the SUS-TAS. The research objective required both quantitative and qualitative research strategies. A survey of households was carried out to gather information from respondents. Yamane’s formula was employed to select the sample size of respondents. Structured questionnaires were used to collect the data and SUS-TAS was applied to serve as a foundation for the analysis of local communities’ attitudes to sustainable tourism development. Delineation of dimensions of SUS-TAS was done by principal component analysis with a varimax rotation. Community members exhibited their agreement to six constructs of sustainable tourism development among seven. This study validates the sustainable tourism attitude scale as one of the premier tools for monitoring sustainable tourism development.