An Approach to the Development and the Promotion of Secondary Tourism Destinations: A Case Study of BuengKan – A Potential Tourism Destination in Northeastern Thailand

Jusana Techakana

doi:10.17762/pae.v58i1.979

Abstract

The Government of Thailand has announced a policy to develop and promote 55 provinces of Thailand to become secondary tourism destinations, BuengKan is a new-born province in the Northern part of Thailand, which is not a popular tourism region compared to the Northern and the Southern regions of the country. Nonetheless, BuengKan has a high potential to become a popular secondary tourism destination because it has a lot of tourism resources to develop various types of tourism with many modes of accessibility. In order to formulate a strategy to develop and promote BuengKan to become a popular secondary tourism destination, guidelines and recommendations from all stakeholders, including the public sector, the private sector, the community sector, and the academic sector need to be gathered. A qualitative research was conducted by employing in-depth interviews with public officers, local politicians, chamber of commerce members, private entrepreneurs in tourism industry, prominent figures of community members, and scholars in the fields of tourism, marketing, and marketing communications. Their answers from the in-depth interviews have been analyzed and organized to formulate development and promotion strategies to make BuengKan a popular secondary tourism destination of Thailand

Highlights

Research ObjectivesThailand has promoted 22 provinces as popular primary tourism destination for many years
The challenges in the development and the promotion of tourism of BuengKan are: (1) upgrading hotels and restaurants to world-class standards, (2) convincing the Government to build an airport in BuengKan, (3) cultivating residents of BuengKan to take pride in being citizens of BuengKan, and (4) amending laws to allow tourists to visit beautiful forests of BuengKan, which are in preserved areas where visitors can only go to see beautiful sceneries, but cannot have any recreational activities
The beautiful parks and forests of BuengKan cannot attract a large number of tourists, (5) designating selling points to differentiate BuengKan with tourism particularities, and (6) formulating an effective integrated marketing communication campaign according to the principles of content marketing

Summary

Introduction

Research ObjectivesThailand has promoted 22 provinces as popular primary tourism destination for many years. In order to increase its revenues from tourism, the Government of Thailand has issued a policy to develop and promote the rest 55 provinces to become secondary tourism destination. On March 22nd,2011, BuengKan was proclaimed the 77 th province of Thailand. It is the latest province separated from Nongkai Province for the purpose of better governance and more efficient security management.[1]Now.BuengKan is a newborn province of Thailand with a high potential to become a popular secondary tourism destination. In order to get guidelines and recommendation, a research must be conducted, so that the findings will be used to develop and promote tourism of BuengKan in order that it will become a popular secondary tourism destination

Methods

Results

Conclusion