Paper Title
Development of Community-based Tourism in Trat Province to Link to Cambodia and Vietnam
Abstract
Trat has a strategic location regarded as the opening gate to connect community-based tourism widely to its
neighboring countries: Cambodia and Vietnam. This study investigated the potential of community-based tourism in Trat
and CBT tourist behavior in order to boost the number of tourists for the region. The results showed that most tourists were
Generation Y (71.5%), whereas the factors influencing tourist behavior were visiting new places, learning new experiences
and cultures as well as joining new tourism activities. The study suggested that the communities needed to search their own
identity and create exotic events to inspire their target group of tourists, including developing cultural communication
between communities and tourists to create collaborative learning, improving English proficiency of the community
members, designing English websites to communicate their historical narratives, cultures and activities to attract more
tourists of different generations. Meanwhile, the community leaders should provide some space and combine the
community identities in different areas with harmony which would strengthen the community-based tourism management in
a long term.
Keywords - Community-based Tourism, Trat Province, Cambodia, Vietnam