PHD-Department of Tourism Management

Permanent URI for this community

https://repository.ku.ac.ke/handle/123456789/230

Browse

Browsing PHD-Department of Tourism Management by Author "Kiria, Sisinio Muthengi"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Success Factors for Viable Tourism Planning, a Case of Nairobi City County, Kenya
    (Kenyatta University, 2019-10) Kiria, Sisinio Muthengi
    Planning is a very crucial process by which tourism is managed by governments at the national and local levels. With all the expected benefits from tourism, planning is core to achieving any tangible results especially in the long term. There is minimal attention given {o tourism research to-date especially on policy regulation and planning models. In Kenya, several policy and planning documents have been developed by expert consultation. Evaluation of Kenyan planning and policy development journey opens up crucial knowledge on tourism planning in the developing countries. Information on challenges to planning and policy development and implementation is rare from literature in the earlier studies done in Kenya hence this study sought to close that knowledge gap. This study assessed stakeholder participation and tourism planning process; interrogated planners’ areas of concern in tourism planning; investigated the elements of tourism plans, evaluated the planning / policy environment in Kenya and assessed the aspects of spatial planning. The study took a diverse of tourism managers of different facilities, tour and travel agencies and attractions as the study population, while government tourist officers, county officers and Non-governmental organizations dealing with tourism were key informants for qualitative data segment. A sample of 275 respondents was drawn from the stakeholders of tourism for quantitative survey and 7 interviews were conducted. The study found out that tourism planning at the institutional and national level lacks stakeholder participation which is a crucial component in planning and policy development and implementation. Because of that, tourism planning in Kenya is haphazard and an ad hoc affair and lacks consistency, planners of tourism of Nairobi in various degrees lacked on crucial objectives of: reducing negative impacts of tourism (social, economic, cultural and natural environmental sustainability); spatial planning objectives for tourist mobility and had not been concerned with reduction of threats to tourism including terrorism and other disasters. There were 4 main predictor variables for plan viability: Tourism planning stakeholder involvement, planners’ main areas of concern, elements of tourism planning and tourism planning environment. Out of the four, the regression model gave tourism planning stakeholder involvement as the highest predictor B value of 0.756 which was very significant at 0.000, and elements of tourism planning a predictor B value of 0.436 with 0.000 significance. The spatial analysis from remote sensed data showed that Nairobi has developed infrastructure between 62.5% and 430% between 1975 to 2017 and reduced its green areas and forests between -3.7% to - 25.7% in the same period. The study concludes that tourism planning environment is currently not conducive for viable planning due to political and economic reasons. To ensure proper environment for planning, the planners need to ensure they develop the capacity of tourism planners at the organizational and national levels that will reduce the employment of foreign consultants in planning process. It henceforth recommends that planners of tourism should encourage tourism stakeholders to get organized into stakeholder groups to gain meaningful input. Another recommendation is that the concerns of tourism planners should be mainly to ensure sustainability if tourism development has to be achieved in any destination. Therefore the plans have to objectively deal with disasters and their cycles at the destinations. For future studies, a study on Geographical Information System (GIS)-based spatial planning will help understand how tourist circuits can be developed for cities like Nairobi and Mombasa and the country as a whole