African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure (May 2018)

Tourism product as a measure to determine the key elements that influence tourists’ decisions to visit Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.

  • Washington Makuzva,
  • Dr Ncedo Jonathan Ntloko

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 3

Abstract

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A tourism product can be bundled together with a range of tourism elements such as accommodation, attractions, activities and tours, price, image, climate and many more elements to form a saleable tourism product. The town of Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, hereafter referred to as Victoria Falls, has a number of tourism elements that build up the tourism product. It is along this idea that understanding the influence each element has on the tourists’ decisions to travel can help in the sustainable development of the entire tourism product. This is because, if one element of the tourism product is underperforming or fails to satisfy the tourists, the whole tourism product may as a result be condemned and then not attract more tourists. This will in turn bring with it a plethora of negative socio-economic impacts for the destination. Therefore, it is fundamentally important to understand the performance of each main element of the tourism product from the tourists’ perspectives, as they are after all, the end users of the tourism product. The main objective of this study was to determine the core elements that influence tourists’ decision to visit Victoria Falls as there is limited research on this aspect. A total of 377 interviewer-administered survey questionnaires were conducted voluntarily, face-to-face, with the tourists using a systematic sampling approach. Key findings revealed that availability of attractions, price of the tourism product as well as accessibility of the destination play a paramount role in influencing the tourists to visit the destination. The results of this study may hopefully help the tourism planners for Victoria Falls in maintaining the elements that are performing well so that they keep influencing the tourists to visit the area while simultaneously addressing and upgrading the elements that are under performing.

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