THE DOMINANT FACTORS OF ECOTOURISM CHARACTERISTICS TOWARD TOURISM PRODUCTS IN CHEROKEE ADVENTURE

Abstract

Tourism has become one of the most growing industries in Indoesia. International tourist arrival in Indonesia has always increased from 2007 and more than 7.5 millions arrival in 2011. It indicates that this country has great potential for tourism. Unfortunately, when the tourism industry is rising, the environmental awareness in Indonesia is decreasing. Therefore, in order to increase the awareness of environmental issue, tourism industry comes up with ecotourism that encompasses activity of tourism in natural way and build interactions with the local people.This research is to find out the dominant characteristics of ecotourism in Cherokee Adventure, an ecotourism organizer that focusing in rafting, that located in Sukabumi, West Java. This company has been chosen because it is already well-known in public. The main theory for this research is the characteristics that have been constructed by World Tourism Organization (WTO) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2002. The researcher used quantitative method and factor analysis to find out the result. Furthermore, primary data and secondary data are used to collect data that are related with this research.There are 4 latent variables that were created as the result of this research. The latent variables are: competent tour guides, interactions with local people, place management, and tourists arrangement. The variable “competent tour guides”, “interactions with local people”, and “place management” consisted of 2 manifest variables, while the variable “tourists arrangement” is the only latent variable that consisted of only 1 manifest variable.