Photo Tourism: A Strategy to Create Entrepreneurs in Tourism Industry (A Case of Nuwaraeliya)

Abstract

Nuwaraeliya in Sri Lanka known as “Little England”, is a prominent tourist destination with the pool of favorable attributes of its own. Tourism which was the third foreign exchange earner in Sri Lanka economy in 2016, increases direct and indirect employment opportunities especially for the host community by synthesizing new elements to the destination. Photo tourism as a novel model to the Sri Lankan Tourism can be accommodated to the retail mix of the destination to create entrepreneurs in tourism since a higher number of local and foreign tourists are visiting Nuwaraeliya. On the other hand, tourists will be facilitated to receive an expertise service from the professionals in photographic. This study focuses to identify the tourist behavior on photo tourism and to observe the potentials for developing photo tourism as a strategy to create entrepreneurs in the destination. Nuwaraeliya was selected as the research area for the study since hundred percent of the tourist visited Nuwaraeliya intend to take many photographs in Nuwaraeliya than the other destinations in Sri Lanka. Research population being the both local and foreign tourists visited Nuwaraeliya 85 respondents were selected as the sample to the study applying purposive sampling technique. Both primary and secondary data were gathered and pre-tested structured questionnaire was used to collect primary data. Mix methodology was used to analyze the data while importing them to the Statistical Package for the Social science (SPSS). The results revealed that there are main potentials where can add healthy competition to generate economic benefits to the host community. Moreover, seventy five percent of the respondents highlighted that photo tourism activities are used by them since they are lacking with the creativity and professionalism even though cameras are carried by them. However, it is needed to introduce photo tourism as a new concept to the tourist stakeholders since it will help to strengthen the local community based on the photo tourism activities. Moreover, Future research should be focused to identify photo tourism as a marketing tool for destination marketing and the issues on the photo tourism.