Approaches to Image Building for Holistic Sustainable Growth of Thailand’s Tourism Industry
Abstract
The purposes of this research were to study approaches to image building for holistic sustainable growth of Thailand’s tourism industry, and to develop structural equation modeling of the approaches to image building for holistic sustainable growth of Thailand’s tourism industry. Mixed methods research was used for research design. In-depth interview was used for qualitative data collection whereas quantitative data was collected by survey from the questionnaires of 500 managers of the tourist organizations by using descriptive statistics, reference statistics and multiple statistics. Result indicated that the approaches to image building for holistic sustainable growth of Thailand’s tourism industry that has shown the highest mean for 4 aspects consisted of 1) the policy aspect as supporting Thailand image to be the best quality tourist places and safety places, 2) the moral aspect as having the fairness of government and recompense, 3) the quality management aspect as developing tourist personnel and promoting the businessman for tourist personnel having the knowledge of sustainable tourist management, and 4) infrastructure aspect as having system of many facilities. Result of hypothesis testing found that a business brings less or equal working for 5 years with the business having more working for 5 years was important to the approaches to image building for holistic sustainable growth without difference. The result of structural equation model analysis showed that the model fit with empirical data, and analysis results revealed that c2 = .099, GFI = 9.62, and RMSEA = .016. Therefore, the structural equation modeling of the approaches to image building for holistic sustainable growth of Thailand’s tourism industry has the consistency with and empirical data.
