ABSTRACT
Operators of the nature-based tourism are in pressing need to come forward with a novel yet practical and sensible nature-based tourism activity that offers distinctly fresh experience. This paper seeks to study the acceptance towards and recognition of nature-based tourism industry especially in relation to visitation to geopark. Two-month self-administered survey (June to July 2012), which structured based on Convenience sampling approach, was done at KILIM Geopark of the Langkawi Island targeting visitors of minimum age 18 years old. The questionnaire survey addressed KILIM Geopark’s visitation tendency characteristics, non water-based tourism activities and sustainable tourism development supportiveness. As respondents share the similar background (in terms of nationality, tourism policy and seasonal tourism activity preference), here, other than studying the KILIM Geopark limited resources’ capability in retaining the respondents’ loyalty, this paper also pays attention to activities that further enriches the tourism experiences. The approach is divided into: [1] engagement with the nature through activities (boat ride, eagle feeding and visit the case) and [2] enjoying the nature by means of passive engagement (walk and stroll, visit geopark and landscape). Moreover, the categorization offers insights on genders’ preference, if any. Of 450 distributed questionnaires, 341 questionnaires
(186 international and 155 domestic respondents) were successfully retrieved where this amounted to 76% response rate. As the main objective is to study the Malaysians’ acceptance towards and recognition of geopark, this paper provides insights on 155 Malaysian respondents who visited KILIM Geopark of the Langkawi Island. Data cleaning technique was employed to ensure the reliability of 341 retrieved questionnaires. Cross Tabulation analysis was employed to examine the following variables’ data distribution, namely visitation tendency, tourism activities and tourism development supportiveness. Regression and correlation analyses, on the other hand, were conducted to study the degree of effectiveness of a variable/a set of variables on a variable/a set of variables.
