Destination Selection in Thailand toward the Risk in the Eyes of Tourist: A Case Study of Tham Luang Cave

Abstract

The tourism risk always high impacted from the big disaster, this study aim to examine the impact factors of tourist who going to visit Tham Luang cave by using 3 research questions (RQ) as following; RQ1) the specific characteristic of the tourist who have heard the news about Tham Luang incident, RQ2) the different between the tourists who have heard the news about Tham Luang cave incident and still want to visit Tham Luang cave and who have heard the news about Tham Luang cave incident but do not want to visit Tham Luang cave and RQ3) the impact factors of tourist who going to visit Tham Luang cave. Samples were gathered from the web-based survey that ent to tourist community groups and the paperbased from the tourists who visited Thailand in many destinations in Bangkok. The total 452 responses, 152 of which were from the online channels, and 300 were from the paper-based questionnaires and there are 267 from 452 responses (59.1%) have heard of Tham Luang cave incident news. For the data analysis approach, we used the escriptive analysis for explaining RQ1 then RQ2 was tested on the basis of student t-test method, finally RQ3 was using the logistic regression to find the impact factors of tourist who going to visit Tham Luang cave. As a result, tourists who have heard news about Tham Luang cave incident also want to visit Tham Luang mostly used information for selection destination from online media and even if they know about the big incident that occur with Tham Luang Cave, they also want to travel with their families while literature, most of tourist who willing to go to the risky destination is the tourist who like to travel as sports tourism and adventure and less concern about the safety of location, however the result of Tham Luang cave case study show the opposite way.