Sustainable Tourism Development in North India

Abstract

The endeavor of the chapter is to inspect the perception of residents, tourists, hoteliers, and travel agents in respect to sustainable development of tourism and to study the role of tourism stakeholders in promotion of sustainable tourism in North India and to suggest the measures for promotion of sustainable tourism in the study area. Based on a survey of initially, 71 items emerged, but after survey, only 43 items were found significant. Likert-type scale values assigned, 1 to “strongly agree,” 2 to “agree,” 3 to “neither agree nor disagree,” 4 to “disagree,” and 5 to “strongly disagree,” was provided to the subjects for them to use in indicating the importance of each of the 71 general sustainable tourism development statements. Of 2300, only 1380 (60%) respondents completed the questionnaires and were valid. The data are analyzed with the statistical package program for social sciences (SPSS 12 for Windows). The basic analysis and tests utilized in this study includes descriptive-statistics analysis, factor analysis, mean and bivariate statistical procedures, etc. The study provides a strong indication that there are significant differences among tourism stakeholders on sustainable tourism development parameters. This research highlights the changes that sustainable tourism development has brought to the community and presents the various perceptions of stakeholders in this particular setting. The research demonstrates that to plan for more sustainable forms of tourism development, the subjective perspectives and the roles of all stakeholders need to be understood and integrated into a responsive planning framework.