Resident attitudes inside Victoria's tourism product regions: A cluster analysis

In the past two decades, there have been 76 published articles that have segmented tourist samples into clusters (Jackson, Inbakaran, & Schmierer, 2003). The principal aims of such research are to better understand tourist characteristics, to identify key variables that predict tourist behaviours, to assess the value of tourism to an area, to provide knowledge to help develop facilities in designated areas, and to allow tourism marketing to plan strategies such as promotion and product development. In contrast, researchers have appeared to assume that the host population is homogeneous and has a uniform response to an increase in tourist numbers and to future sustainable tourism within the community. This research study used a cluster analysis to segment the host community into four cluster groups. Demographic variables constituted the cluster base. These four cluster groups differed from each other on gender ratio, age, life cycle stage, education, migration status, occupation and current involvement with tourism. A further analysis demonstrated that these cluster groups significantly differed from each other in terms of both attitude towards current tourist numbers and future tourism development. The results of this study are discussed in terms of exploring the underlying causes of both positive and negative attitudes of hosts toward tourism. This research highlights differing attitudes present in various community groups and explores implications for the tourist industry.