Attractiveness of Gambella as a Tourist Destination: An Importance - Performance Analysis

Abstract

Ethiopia was selected the World Best Tourist Destination for 2015 by the European Council for Tourism and Trade (ECTT) however there are some places within Ethiopia that still lag behind in being attractive tourist destinations. One such place is Gambella and therefore, in this study an attempt was made to understand the issues because of which Gambella has not been a preferred choice of tourists. Consequently, after going through number of researches regarding destination competitiveness 28 attributes were selected for the study to understand competitiveness of Gambella as a tourist destination. Only international tourists above the age of 18 years were selected for the study so as to avoid bias, to have reliable results and to know the issues in depth as usually international tourists are well travelled. A total of 78 international tourists participated in the study who visited Gambella during November 2016 to April, 2017. Census survey was deployed as the number of tourists coming to Gambella was very low despite of being the peak season there at the above mentioned time. The main technique used for analysing the data was importance performance analysis keeping in view its popular usage in such types of studies. It was found that though Gambella can boast of natural beauty, distinctive local feature, churhes and behaviour of host community still it needs to immediately concentrate upon water services, wildlife, signposts, security, information centres activities for children to attract more number of tourists.

Keywords: Tourist Satisfaction, Importance Performance Analysis, Destination Attractiveness

View PDF