CONSUMER BEHAVIOR AMONG DOMESTIC TOURISTS: A CASE STUDY OF TRAVEL AGENCIES IN NAIROBI, KENYA.

Abstract

The Consumer Behaviors is a combination of acts, attitudes and decisions made concerning the buying

and consuming of the tourism products and services offered to tourists in destination areas and its post- buying reactions. Consumer behavior plays a key role in marketing activities of tourist products especially

in promoting and selling tourism products and services in tourist destinations. The purpose of this research study is to establish factors affecting consumer behavior among Domestic tourists in travel agents in Nairobi, Kenya. The specific objectives of the study were to determine the extent to which price, product and safety affects consumer behavior among Domestic tourists in travelling agents. The research adopted descriptive design. The target population was 306 (KATA,2019) employees involved in travelling agents and sample size of 75 employees were selected using Fisher, Laing & Stoeckel (1983) formula. The study used both systematic techniques and stratification methods from each stratum in sampling employees. Convenient method was used to select 35 travel agents out of 114 (KATA, 2019) in Nairobi (Appendix II). The study used both primary and secondary data which was collected by use of questionnaire survey. The analyzing of qualitative data was done by use of the format in the thematic content analysis, while, quantitative data was done by use of descriptive and inferential statistics through the use of statistical packages for social sciences (SPSS), Chi-square (χ2

), ANOVA and descriptive tests were performed. The data were presented by use of graphs, pie charts and table. Employees were asked to respond to a set of statements on the Likert scale where 5=strongly agreed, 4= agreed 3= neutral, 2= disagree, 1= strongly disagree and they had enough knowledge about travel agents in order to understand and respond to the questions. Descriptive analysis was used to summarize data regarding product, price and safety and Consumer Behavior in tourism destination. It’s evident that majority of the respondents strongly agreed that product, price and safety influence a tourist in decision-making to consume a product. Correlation analysis was used to investigate the existence and nature of relationship between Product, Pricing, Safety and consumer behavior among Domestic tourists. The study concludes that tourist behaviors is strongly influenced by price with 41.4% change followed by product and safety respectively as indicated by a Pearson correlation coefficient of .653**,.611** and .633** These relationships were found to be statistically significant as the significant value was 0.000 which is less than 0.05 threshold. Since, price,

product and safety affects tourists, further research for Safety should be carried on to ascertain the individual safety of tourists in destination areas, especially this era of Al-Shabaab which is a security challenge to Kenya and the horn of East Africa as a whole. The study will benefit travel agents and tourism industry as a whole since the sector continues to be one of the largest industries in the world. Also, further research with wider scope to be carried on as this study could not exhaust all the factors affecting consumer behavior among Domestic tourists.