Guideline for Promoting Sustainable Tourism Development in Historical Community : Case study of Amphawa Community, Samut Songkhram

Abstract

Amphawa is a historical community, where tourism is the main driver contributing to its economy. In the past decade, unsustainable tourism has led to the problems of natural resources degradation, way-of-life alteration, environmental problems, and conflicts within the community of Amphawa. Given these existing problems along with the halt of travel industry due to the covid-19 pandemic, it grants the opportunity for Amphawa community to plan and transform this community-based tourism toward sustainability. This research aims to study about the relative importance of factors promoting sustainable tourism development through conducting the interviews with key stakeholders in Amphawa community including local residents, visitors, private sector, governmental agencies, academics, and experts. By ranking factors under pairwise comparison based on the application of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), it reflected each stakeholder’s perspectives toward sustainable tourism development in Amphawa community.

The results of this study illustrated that each stakeholder in Amphawa community prioritized the factors promoting sustainable tourism development differently. Local residents and governmental agencies laid on the factor of improving the quality of life of the community and factor of managerial policies and tourism promotion as utmost importance. On the other hand, academics, experts, and private sector prioritized the factor of economic value and employment opportunity, whereby the visitors concerned the factor of satisfaction toward historical and cultural conservation-based tourism as the most significance. Nevertheless, stakeholders in Amphawa community have concurred that tourism promotion measures, such as providing tax benefits to tourism-related businesses, and providing stimulus package promoting tourism sector, would significantly enhance the community-based tourism development. Furthermore, inclusive participatory approach in planning process, and rigorous law enforcement, monitoring, and evaluation are the important strategies driving the efficient sustainable tourism development.