Factors that Affecting to Develop Buddhist Tourism in Sri Lanka

Over the decades, tourism has seen continuous growth and diversification to become one of the fastest growing economic sectors in the world. Sri Lanka has grown to one million tourists since the end of ethnic war, 2009. However, little attention is paid to religious and cultural purposes when visiting Sri Lanka by tourist. Therefore, the main problem for this study arises from this scenario. Sri Lanka is researching and trying to launch new products, including Buddhist tourism, for the Sri Lankan tourism industry to attract more tourists who will benefit to tourism development. Pilgrimage, spirituality, heritage sight seen and education purposes of Buddhist philosophy and culture are vital in Buddhist tourism in Sri Lanka. The main objectives of this study are a to identify the key contributory factors for Buddhist tourism development b to identify behavioral pattern of Buddhist tourist in Sri Lanka c to prospect and challengers to develop Buddhist tourism in Sri Lanka. This study used open and closed ended questions. The main source of information is a quantitative tool for in depth interviews with 80 tourism stakeholders who play different roles in the industry. The collected data has been analyzed with the help of mean score and ranking technique used in Phi coefficients test. The chi square test illustrates the relationship between theory and observation. The results of this study indicate that there is a great potential for the development of Buddhist tourism in Sri Lanka, Therefore, there are three main factors that contribute to the development of Buddhist tourism in Sri Lanka. Those are, Buddhist tourism marketing strategies, role of qualified human resource to cater Buddhist tourism and availability of excessive amount of Buddhist venues. And also, the based on analysis identified behavioral patterns of the Buddhist tourist in Sri Lanka. A. R. N. T. Jayasinghe "Factors that Affecting to Develop Buddhist Tourism in Sri Lanka" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-4 | Issue-6 , October 2020, URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd35741.pdf Paper Url: https://www.ijtsrd.com/humanities-and-the-arts/tourism/35741/factors-that-affecting-to-develop-buddhist-tourism-in-sri-lanka/a-r-n-t-jayasinghe