Abstract:
Tourism is a booming industry. Sri Lanka as a County with tourism Potentials, it is important to identify new market trends. There is a new trend in most of the global businesses to adapt to environmental friendly practices or green concepts. This is as a part of environmental conservation, or attracts interested markets towards their businesses. Because tourism is directly deals with the environment, environmental impact of the tourism is high. The concept eco-lodge was introduced to develop environmental responsible travel of tourists while contributing environmental conservation. Tourists' have different accommodation options when travelling. Among them there should be some factors which influence tourists' decision to select eco friendly hotels. There are only few number of researches are available to identifying the influencing factors of tourists eco hotel selection. It is important to identify those factors to development of eco friendly niche market.
This study was conducted based on eco lodge in Dambulla area. Among the population of tourists accommodate in eco hotels in Si Lanka, Sample was 100 numbers of tourists who accommodate in eco lodge in Dambulla at the particular period of time. Objectives' of this research was to identify profile of the tourists' who select eco hotels, To identify the factors which influencing tourists decision to select eco hotels and analysis the relationship between influencing factors and tourists' decision. This was a Quantitative research and used Descriptive statistics, Multiple Linear regression analysis and correlation analysis to analyse the data.
This study identified market profile of the tourists who select eco friendly hotels in Sri Lanka. And also able to identify relationship between Cultural, Social, Personal and Psychological factors which influence tourists decision to select eco friendly hotels.
Consequently this study shows that awareness of environmental friendly practices of tourism business should be increase from the both tourists' and business owners to the development of this market.
