Sustainability of Cultural Heritage Tourism: A Study Based on Cultural Triangle in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Cultural heritage tourism is one of the fastest-growing forms of tourism. The cultural triangle in Sri Lanka has great potentiality to develop cultural heritage tourism as it consists of unique cultural and heritage attractions including five of the UNESCO world heritage sites. Enhancing Sustainability is the key factor for developing the cultural triangle as one of the sustainable cultural heritage tourism destinations. Through the research, focus to identify how to achieve sustainable cultural heritage tourism in the cultural triangle. The main objective of the study is to achieve destination sustainability and identifying the potentiality for cultural heritage tourism development in the cultural triangle. The research is conducted using the quantitative method and primary data use to test the four hypotheses and to identify the correlation. A structured questioner was given to the non-randomly selected 265 (N) international tourists to represent their perceptions. SPSS was used to analyze the data. The results reveal that the most visited attractions in the cultural triangle and the four hypotheses were accepted. As the major findings identified that stakeholder involvement, economic development, environmental conservation, tourist satisfaction are leads to achieve sustainable cultural heritage tourism development in the cultural triangle, Sri Lanka.