Contribution of urban tourism pull factors to sustainable tourism development in Nairobi City County, Kenya

Abstract

International urban tourism remains the most vibrant tourism form. Urban tourism is still a new phenomenon in most African countries considering they focus on wildlife tourism. The tourism attractions in cities are increasingly on high demand by visitors. Therefore, this study sought to investigate the contribution of urban tourism pull factors to sustainable tourism development. The study achieved this through four objectives namely, to determine the relationship between diversity of tourism attractions and sustainable tourism development; relationship between destination attributes and sustainable tourism development; relationship between tourist satisfaction and sustainable tourism development; and assess tourism products in Nairobi City County. The study was anchored on Dann theory of push and pull motivation and adopted convergent parallel mixed method strategy embedded in both descriptive and exploratory research designs. The target population was based on 781,500 arriving tourists via Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) in 2016 out of which 384 formed the sample size. Questionnaires were used to collect data from the tourists, interviews conducted on 12 tourism planners while observational schedule was used to check features of urban tourism. Two stage cluster sampling was done on both quantatitive and qualititive data. Simple random sampling was used in selecting departing tourists from the different terminals within JKIA, while tourism planners were purposefully selected from the public and business sectors. Quantitative data was analyzed using Pearson correlation analysis and multiple linear regressions while qualitative data used thematic analysis. Diversity of tourism forms showed mixed relationships with leisure and recreation tourism (r, 231 = 0.23, p < 0.01) and wildlife tourism (r, 231 =0.10, p = 0.10) having positive relationships. Cultural heritage tourism (r, 231 = -0.17, p = 0.01) had a negative relationship. The statistical association on tourist satisfaction (r, 231 = 0.33, p < 0 .01) showed a weak positive relationship. Regression results revealed that diversity of tourism attractions (ß = 0.21, t = 6.33, p < 0.01), destination attributes (ß = 0.35, t = 9.43, p < 0.01) and tourist satisfaction (ß = 0.33, t = 10.96, p < 0.01) significantly predicted sustainable tourism development. Further, multiple linear regression analysis established that urban tourism pull factors explained 70% (R2 = 0.70) of the variance in sustainable tourism development. Thus, the study revealed destination attributes were the most influential predictor of sustainable tourism development as compared to those of diversity tourism attractions. These findings were reinforced by tourism planners, that Nairobi urban destination has immense exploited and unexploited tourism products. The researcher observed that cultural and wildlife photographs are mounted on JKIA windows and walls to depict the rich culture and wildlife in Kenya. In conclusion, the results revealed that all three variables used to measure the contribution of urban tourism pull factors made significant contribution towards sustainability on Nairobi urban destination. Tourism planners noted that visitors to the urban destination have been consuming the urban product. The study recommends improvement of urban destination attributes including individual safety and security and the undamaged environment so as to increase their contributions towards sustainability of urban destination. The planners should take cognizance of the immense potential of Nairobi urban destination attractions such as a modern multi-cultural city, wildlife attractions and a pristine outdoor recreation environment.