Visitor responses to environmental interpretation in protected areas in Vietnam: a motivation-based segmentation analysis

ABSTRACT

Environmental interpretation is regarded as an effective soft management strategy for educating visitors and managing their impacts on protected areas. Only limited research has been conducted on visitors’ views on environmental interpretation in protected areas in the rapidly developing destinations of South-East Asia, with particular gaps in understanding different visitor groups. This article seeks to fill this gap in the context of Vietnam by examining visitor responses to services for environmental interpretation in one of the country’s largest national parks. The research employed importance-performance analysis and subsequent motivation-based visitor segmentation based on 237 sets of pre- and post-visit questionnaires distributed by the authors as self-complete questionnaires at the entry and exit gateway to the national park. The findings highlight that site interpreters were considered the most important service providers, while displays at the museum and videos were identified as important but low performing. A number of differences between motivation-based visitor groups as well as some culturally anchored response patterns emerged which highlighted the need for park management to consider different visitor groups; not only in terms of their motivations to visit but also their cultural backgrounds when designing, investing maintenance funding, and evaluating interpretive services.

KEYWORDS:

• Protected areas
• interpretation
• motivation
• importance-performance analysis
• segmentation
• Vietnam

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Lisa Woods from the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Victoria University of Wellington for her comments and advice on the statistical tests as well as the Management and visitors of Cat Tien National Park for supporting this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Thi Thuy Linh Phan is a Lecturer in the School of Hospitality at Hue University. She completed a Master of Tourism Management at Victoria University in Wellington (New Zealand), for which she received a New Zealand Asean Scholar Award (NZAS).

Christian Schott is Senior Lecturer at Victoria Business School (Victoria University of Wellington) in New Zealand and Chair of the VBS United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education Steering Group. Christian’s research interests include sustainable tourism development, technology enhanced teaching and learning, and youth mobility. These interests have seen him involved in research projects in Europe, Central America, the Pacific, the Sub-Antarctic and New Zealand. Christian is on the editorial board of several journals in the Tourism Management discipline, past Vice Chair of the Tourism Education Futures Initiative, recipient of a VUW Teaching Excellence Award, and past holder of German Government (DAAD) Scientist Scholarship Award.

ORCID

Christian Schott http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5865-6139

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by New Zealand Aid Programme.