Abstract:
As one of the largest and expanded industries in the world, Tourism industry offers more benefits to various groups of communities in both rural and urban areas. Sri Lanka tourism is rapidly growing after the civil war period recording higher number of tourist arrivals annually. Diversified tourism activities have been developed by focusing the tourists and maintaining a strong interaction with local community is almost important since these activities generate negative impacts too. Amidst to this background, this study aims to analyze the type of brand image that hotels gain through CSR activities, identify the most effective CSR activities which can create positive brand image on local community and further, to compare the type of brand image between hotels that conducting CSR activities and non-conducting CSR activities in non-urban areas. The population for the study being the local community who established around hotels and experienced CSR activities conducted by the hoteliers, a sample of 100 community members were selected from Kandy and Galle districts by applying the judgmental sampling technique. Reviewing the related literature, a questionnaire was prepared to collect primary data from the respondents and Secondary data were used. Descriptive statistics, multiple regression analysis, correlation analysis have been used to analyze data while importing them to the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The results revealed that the sensuality type brand image effects highly by CSR activities among three types of brand image and CSR activities have a significant relationship with the brand image of the local community. Further, this study illustrates that there is a huge difference of brand image value between hotels that conduct CSR activities and the hotels that do not conduct CSR activities on local community who established around their hotels.
