Risk Perception of Interaction with Dolphin in Bunbury, West Australia

CONG Li1,+, WU Bihu2, ZHANG Yujun1, David Newsome3

1. Tourism Management Department, Landscape School, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100083; 2. International Centre for Recreation and Tourism Research, School of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871; 3. Environment and Conservation, Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia 6831; † E- mail: congli1980@163.com

Abstract This research aims to analyze the risk perception of tourists in Dolphin Discovery Center (DDC) Bunbury, West Australia and serves for the destination a management and marketing. Factor analysis, K-means cluster analysis and variance analysis were combined to examine the extent of risk perception for DDC and demographic differences. The main conclusions were as following: three factors that tourism experience quality, physical safety, and amenity were extracted based on the exploring factor analysis; according to the extent of risk perception, wildlife tourists had been divided into three categories: weak risk awareness, medium risk perception, and strong risk perception. Wildlife tourists perceived experience quality risk as the strongest factor and physical safety as the weakest factor, and amenity risk was in an intermediate position. Independent-sample t test and variance analysis were used to examine the demographic difference in risk perception and the results showed that different age, income and family status all had significant difference in risk perception except gender; tourism experience, travelling companion, expenditure and staying time and other tourism behavior all had significant difference in risk perception as well as satisfaction and willingness to revisit, except for information source. Key words wildlife tourism; non-consumptive; risk perception; Australia; dolphin