Quantitative Analysis of the Effect of Geo-resources to Attract Travelers in Oki islands: Travelers Segments Identified by Latent Class Analysis and Its Characteristics

The increase in travelers by utilizing Geo-resources is expected in regions promoting Global Geopark activities. In order to increase the travelers attracted by Geo-resources, approaches to tourists based on marketing management are required. However, there has been no studies that quantitatively verified the effect of Geo-resources to attract the travelers and identified the multifaceted characteristics of the travelers attracted by Geo-resources. The purposes of this study are the following. The first purpose is to divide the traveler visiting to Geo-region into some segments by applying the latent class analysis to the data concerning pull factors and then to confirm existence of the traveler segment which includes Geo-resources as a pull factor （ Geo-resources segment ） . The second purpose is to clarify the characteristics of the Geo-resources segment and then to provide the marketing strategy which makes the Geo-resources segment a target. For these purposes, Oki islands are set as an analysis object and the questionnaire survey of the travelers visiting to Oki islands has been conducted. Applying latent class analysis to classification of Oki islands travelers, six traveler segments have been extracted. By observing the main pull factors which take high conditional probability, it is shown that these segments are characterized as “no pull factor”, “nature”, “nature and Geo-resources”, “atmosphere of Island”, “standard” and “standard and Geo-resources”. Since the Geo-resources segments are observed in this result, it is cleared that Geo-resources have the effect to attract the travelers. The differences in socioeconomic attributes, expectations, consciousness and evaluation between the Geo-resources segment and the others segments have been analyzed by using chi-square test or t test. From these results, it is revealed that “nature and Geo-resources” segment is mainly characterized by “beginner”, “someone perceiving Oki as general”, in contrast, “standard and