effects of marketing strategies on tourists’ choice of maasai mara national reserve, kenya

Abstract

Managing and marketing destinations is challenging because of the variety of stakeholders involved in the development and production of tourism products. Marketing should ensure alignment of aims of various stakeholders on tourist destination on its long-term attraction and competitiveness. The Kenyan tourist destinations have become less competitive due to improper marketing strategies. However, understating how different marketing strategies affect tourist destinations choice is still limited. Moreover, many researchers argue that management in the tourist industry are not aware of the various marketing strategies provided by various tourist firms to enable them select their destinations. Therefore, the study investigated the effects of marketing strategies on tourists’ choice on Maasai Mara National Reserve Kenya. It was specifically aimed at establishing the effect of destination marketing organizations, tourism promotion campaigns, tourism information centers and web based technologies on tourist destination choice. The study was informed by the classic line of thought and the alternative line of thought models. The research design used was descriptive survey and explanatory which enabled the researcher to gather data from the population. The target population was tourists visiting Maasai Mara National Reserve for the first six months of 2015. The simple random sampling techniques were used to select a sample of 224 tourists. Questionnaires were used to collect the relevant quantitative data, with crobanch alpha being used to determine the reliability of the scales used. The data collected was analyzed using descriptive statistical techniques such as frequencies, mean, and standard deviation and presented using tables and charts. The researcher also used inferential statistics (t-test) and employed Pearson correlation to show the relationships that exist between the variables. Multiple regressions analysis was also performed to show the causal effect. Findings showed that destination marketing organizations (β 1 = 0.317), tourism promotion campaign (β 2 = 0.242) and web based technology (β 3 = 0.436) all with a p-value = 0.000 had a significant and positive effect on tourist destination choice. However, tourism information centers had a negative and significant effect on destination choice (β4 = -0.237, p-value = 0.000). This infers that the use of destination marketing organizations, tourism promotion campaign and web based technology enhances the destination choice while use of tourism information centers reduce destination choice. In multiple regression model, the results showed that all the four predictors; information centers, Web based technologies, Tourism promotion campaign and Destination Marketing Organizations explained 50.5 percent variation of destination choice. The study therefore concludes that the findings provided enough evidence that marketing strategies are important direct factors of influence on destination choice. Recommends to the management of tourism sites to develop an image and engage in marketing strategies in order to create a positive attitude on its customers/tourists to ensure that their destinations are chosen.