Abstract:
This thesis, Tourism Industry Development of Laos PDR, aims to study the factors affect the tourism demand from foreign visitor, to analyse the industry prospect, and to identify all possible causes that hinder the industry development in Laos PDR. The information from the context will assist the relevant parties to pave a way for the brighter future of Laos PDR tourism industry. To make the study more specific, the paper focuses on the western tourists who visited Laos PDR from October 2001 to April 2002 with the sample size of 384. Information necessary for the study is gathered from both primary and secondary sources. The paper applies both descriptive and quantitative approach with a method called "Multinomial Logit", a multiple regression model that enables a researcher to find the significantly independent variable(s). In this context, the regressors are age, gender, travelling expense, visitor origination, personal interest, media from which visitor receives the information, travelling companion, and travelling frequency to Laos PDR. The qualitative result reveals that the number of tourists has been gradually increasing. The majority is Thai tourist accountable for 80% of total visitors in Laos PDR. This uptrend is a result of the cross-border scheme, a collaboration plan that provides useful and important guide to the tourists before entering to Laos PDR, between Laos PDR and Thailand initiated in 1996. However, the policies regarding the tourism development are urgently in need to increase the country's competitiveness, comparing to its neighboring country like Thailand since Laos PDR possesses a number of fantastic and potential attracting sites. In addition to the descriptive results, the statistic parameter, Mc-Fadden R[superscript 2], from quantitative approach shows a moderate satisfaction figure i.e. R[superscript 2] = 0.657. The results also indicate that independent variables (personal interest) and historical site and entertaining site are correlated