Structural evaluation of attitudes towards rural tourism: A proposed study

Abstract

People are visiting rural places of interest like never before; this has garnered much interest in tourism academia. With scholastic advances in the field of sustainable tourism development over the last 4 decades, it is important that growth should be managed and measured through the paradigms of sustainable tourism development (Institutional, Economic and Environmental), that becomes the essence of this conceptual paper wherein an attempt is made to predict the attitudes of tourists towards rural destinations in order to further comprehend the economic dynamics of sustainable tourism development and its implication on rural destinations. The study aims to utilise existing epistemological aspects pertaining to the investigation of tourist behaviour, the authors have attempted to adapt the Theory of Planned Behaviour and use one of its verticals that is `attitude' to study the population.