Key Locational Characteristics that Influence on Attracting Tourists to Sri Lanka

This research was conducted to assess the existing locational characteristics of Sri Lanka which could influence on attracting tourists to the country. The major problem of the study is identifying the critical locational characteristics that cause to attract more tourists to Sri Lanka. It has been observed that there are three major locational characteristics such as Natural attractiveness, Cultural attractiveness and Climate which have discussed by the scholars and applicable to the Sri Lankan context. The main objective of the study is to identify the most important characteristics which help to attract tourists to Sri Lanka. The secondary objectives are determining the impact of the influence of the characteristics on tourist attraction & exploring the influence of the characteristics for future tourist attraction. The research coverage areas are Colombo District and Hikkaduwa Narigama area. Data were collected through a structured questionnaire. The findings are based on the primary data collection and, they have been analyzed with Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) 16.0 and the SmartPLS (Partial Least Square) 3.0. There were 62 sample size and whole sample responded for the questionnaire. Findings of the study exposed all three characteristics are important for tourist attraction. According to the result of Path Coefficient, all the three variables are statistically significant and natural attractiveness (0.454), cultural attractiveness (0.247) and climate (0.213) are a significant moderately strong relationship with tourist attraction. Therefore, all three variables positively impact to the tourist attraction and natural attractiveness is the major among them. It is also found that there are specific things to be taken into account for the accomplishment of attracting the expected group of tourists to the country.