An Investigation of Tourist Behavior towards Creative Tourism and its Relationship with Revisiting Intention

Abstract

Urry (1990) indicated, tourism is culture. In other words, it can be expressed culture is the main part of travel. Culture plays a vital role in tourism development across the globe. It has strengthened, and supported economic development strategies in the current trend of globalization. As McCann (2002) pointed out, culture has become central to many development strategies worldwide. Thus, cultural tourism is considered as the main contributor to economic growth of the country. However, the development of cultural tourism cannot assure the success to a tourism destination anymore. The reasons being, the economy is moving from a servicebased to an experience-based one, labelled as the Experience economy and the Creative economy the ability to create social experiences and networking by memorable events. Under an experience economy, experience is viewed as a divergent economic offering and it provides the key to future economic growth. The appearance of the new economy, calls upon new tools in present tourism scenario. One of these tools is creative tourism. Creative tourism is a new type of cultural tourism and a powerful tool for economic development. It is considered as the future of cultural tourism. Therefore, it is beneficial for tourism stakeholders to understand the behavior of tourist towards creative tourism activities, and offer cultural product in such a way that leads to maximum satisfaction. The main aim of the present study was to investigate the influencing factors of tourist behavior towards creative tourism and to find out their relationship with tourist revisiting intention. The study also examines the significant difference of tourist behavior and revisiting intention by demographic profile. The study was exploratory-cum-descriptive in nature. Both primary and secondary data was used for the purpose of data collection. The study was carried out at potential creative tourist destinations of Kashmir, as the area is having full potential of being creative tourism destination because of its div