WHAT DRIVES THE TOURISM INDUSTRY IN SAMARINDA? AN EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

Abstract

Currently, tourism activities depend not only on what is visible but on a synergistic effort to attract visitors. If they don’t make repairs immediately, their interest will slowly dwindle. This situation has become a high enigma and attracted us to identify the relationship between visitors’ bonding, city branding, technology adaptation, innovation and creativity, and market segmentation. It described the explanation with the support of 1,278 informants, where we interviewed them while visiting six popular destinations in Samarinda. Using a convenience sampling procedure, we processed the survey data through multiple regression and IBM-SPSS software, which analyzed two structures (direct path and mediation path). The terms that are significant or not significant are p <0.05 for direct effects, and special moderating effects are p <0.01. Exploration showed official outputs, including a positive-significant relationship from visitors bonding to technology adaptation, innovation and creativity to city branding and market segmentation, innovation and creativity to city branding through market segmentation. Unexpectedly, city branding has a positive but not significant effect on visitors’ bonding, technology adaptation and innovation and creativity. The results are negative but significant, and technology adaptation has a negative-not significant effect on market segmentation. The novelty of this paper has implications for strength, opinion, and decomposition that need a discussion on the future agenda.