Factors affecting the growth of the domestic tourism in Uganda

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to establish the factors affecting the growth of domestic tourism in Uganda. Domestic tourism paramount in escalating the development process and has over the last decade made significant contributions to job creation, export revenue, and domestic value added, and helps improve the attractiveness and well-being of places, not only as destinations to visit, but also to live, work and invest. Domestic tourism demand is thus of inevitable importance in a growing country like Uganda. However, its growth is limited by a number of both socio-economic and demographic factors. The study focused mainly on; demographic factors like sex, age, marital status, economic factors like individual incomes, tourist prices, transports costs and socio factors like tourist information, and education level. Secondary data from a sample of 991 private households and 37,947individuals interviewed from the Uganda Tourism Board was used for the study. The study found out that; 58.22% of the study population was having low demand for domestic travel and other domestic recreational activities. The demand also varied across sex of the household head where more female headed households than males headed had high demand for domestic tourism with 60.75% of male headed having low demand for domestic tourism while 55.84% of female headed households were having low demand for domestic tourism. There was a statistically significant relationship between sex of the household head and domestic tourism demand (p= 0.000) < 0.05). More generally, domestic tourism demand had a significant relationship with age, marital status, employment status, tourist information, education level at 95% level of confidence. There is need for the government of Uganda to strengthen and/or establish regional tourist centers in the rural areas, reduce tourist prices, design better marketing strategies to create awareness, emphasizing the importance of leisure on health, promote literacy levels among her citizens and direct more funds aimed at developing the tourism industry which will also boast the domestic tourism contribution to her Gross Domestic Product so as to compete with her neighbors.