Customer Involvement in Sustainable Tourism Planning at Lake Balaton, Hungary—Analysis of the Consumer Preferences of the Active Cycling Tourists
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Department of Tourism, University of Pannonia, Egyetem str. 10, H-8200 Veszprém, Hungary
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Department of Quantitative Methods, University of Pannonia, Egyetem str. 10, H-8200 Veszprém, Hungary
3
Institute of Marketing and Tourism, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Pécs, Rákóczi str. 80, H-7622 Pécs, Hungary
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2020, 12(12), 5174; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12125174
Received: 14 May 2020
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Revised: 12 June 2020
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Accepted: 21 June 2020
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Published: 24 June 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Tourism and Sustainability: Combining Tourist’s Needs with Destinations’ Development)
This study uses an innovative tourism product development approach, based on co-creation or customer involvement, related to Lake Balaton, a mass tourism-based destination in Hungary, from the point of view of the market segment of active cycling tourists. The investigation of opportunities for the development of cycling tourism first of all relies on the new approach of attraction and product development around the destination, in which it is important to take into consideration the consumer preferences of the most important related group of tourists—active cycling tourists. The sustainable approach of tourism product development also provides an opportunity to decrease the spatial and temporal concentration of tourism, which is largely concentrated on the summertime season. The aim of this study is to explore aspects of the customers’ demand for tourism development in terms of cycling tourism with the help of primary data collection, in order to provide adequate directions for sustainable tourism development in the destination. Revealing the demand side of active cycling tourism related to Lake Balaton, the authors used both qualitative (focus group discussions and structured interviews) and quantitative questionnaire survey (computer-assisted data collection) research methods. The latter online surveys were carried out in November and December, 2019, and resulted with an appraisable sample of 809 questionnaires. As for the method, descriptive statistics and relationship analyses were applied. More than five thousand (5050) possible relationships were examined between the closed answers of the questionnaire by Kendall’s rank correlation coefficient (τ) and Cramer’s V, depending on whether they could be measured on a nominal or ordinal scale. The results show that the content analysis of the primary research provides well determined directions for the sustainable tourism development of cycling tourism at Lake Balaton, so customer involvement seems to be a win-win situation both for the customers (tourists) and the decision makers.
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MDPI and ACS Style
Lőrincz, K.; Banász, Z.; Csapó, J. Customer Involvement in Sustainable Tourism Planning at Lake Balaton, Hungary—Analysis of the Consumer Preferences of the Active Cycling Tourists. Sustainability 2020, 12, 5174. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12125174
AMA Style
Lőrincz K, Banász Z, Csapó J. Customer Involvement in Sustainable Tourism Planning at Lake Balaton, Hungary—Analysis of the Consumer Preferences of the Active Cycling Tourists. Sustainability. 2020; 12(12):5174. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12125174
Chicago/Turabian StyleLőrincz, Katalin, Zsuzsanna Banász, and János Csapó. 2020. "Customer Involvement in Sustainable Tourism Planning at Lake Balaton, Hungary—Analysis of the Consumer Preferences of the Active Cycling Tourists" Sustainability 12, no. 12: 5174. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12125174
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