The Role of Urban Elements in Attracting and Sustaining Tourists

Tourist motivation studies among other stages of tourists‟ behaviour help the researcher to find the most important motivational factors, which make tourist to visit a particular destination. In urban tourism, motivational factors are more related to the urban elements which absorbs tourist to visit and have a longer length of stay in a particular destination. Environmental quality, quality of infrastructure, quality of tourism services and facilities, legal and administrative factors, destination attractions, and hospitality and courtesy of the host community are the elements of the urban landscape to attract tourists. Ramsar is one of the main cities in the northern part of Iran which absorbs lots of tourists every year. Accordingly, this study tried to find the main elements of the city which absorbs tourist and the priority of each for tourists. 30 tourists who visited Ramsar were asked to fill the prepared questionnaire to collect primary data. The Reliability of the items in the questionnaire was checked before starting the main analysis of the study. A descriptive analysis has been done to find the variance of tourists' demographic profile. The mean score was calculated for each item of the second part of questionnaire to find the priority of each item. The analysis shows the importance of each element of the city and the level of satisfaction has been received by tourists.

Keywords:

Motivation , Urban Tourism , Erban Elements , and Ramsar