Impacts of Socioeconomic Characteristics and Landscape Elements on Users’ Preferences in Nigerian Tourist Centres

Abstract

There is a notable gap in empirical research focusing on the impacts of socioeconomic characteristics and quality of landscape elements (LEs) on users' preferences and experiences, particularly in Nigerian tourist centres. Six tourist hotels were carefully chosen, one from each state in South-West Nigeria. Accidental sampling method was used for questionnaire administration. Descriptive statistics techniques that comprised mean, frequency count, and relative importance index (RII) were used for analysis. The results of visitors’ purpose of visitation to tourist centres indicated that 54.3% visited because of leisure, while education had 31.2% and adventure had 14.5%. The results of users’ assessments of the LEs show that the majority of landscape features were positively rated as good, including vegetation (63.7%), water features (58.7%), and pathways and walkways (63.7%). The majority of respondents (85.1%) indicated that they strongly agree that the quality of LEs impacts their choice of tourist destination. The result on the importance of LEs to visitors’ preference index (ILEVPI) showed that 12 out of 21 acknowledged variables had an ILEVPI above the average of 3.88. The results showed a noteworthy relationship between variables of socioeconomic characteristics and users’ preferences, with p-values that were significant at the 0.05 level. These comprised gender, age, occupation and education qualification, marital status, and monthly income with p-values of 0.014, 0.000, 0.000, 0.050, 0.010, and 0.020, respectively. The study concluded that the impacts of LEs and socioeconomic characteristics of users are high and they are strong factors that determined users’ preferences for tourists’ centre.