First of all, let’s me define you what is an ecotourism. Basically, ecotourism is from two words which are ecological and tourism, it is the travel to natural area, as well as local communities that conserve the environment, or sustain the well being of the local people. Our main goal for this exploration is to create an ecotourism site on a Kuy indigenous community. I hope this project will actually happen one day, because it give such huge impacts on the community. It creates job for local people, by being a tour guide, giving accommodation or homestay to people, ability to show their skills or other. Therefore, it give the advantages to the natural resources, and environment as well. Before, most the villagers in the community are cutting down trees to sell or make coal, hunting for animals… But if the project happen, all of those activities will not going to happen again.
In the process of creating this site, we need to do the research of the marketing for the project. We went to different places around Phnom Penh to interview the tourist from different countries. Basically, our main goal for the tourist survey questions is to ask, If there’s an ecotourism site that supports indigenous community and wildlife on the loop to Angkor Wat temple, Preah temple, and Sambor Prei Kuk temple, would they like to visit or willing to go? Good news is that 82.6% of the tourists are interested to go, 11.1% of the tourists are maybe to go, and only 6.3% are not interested to go.
In addition, We went to their community and interviewed each family. Before we do our interview, we did a presentation to the villagers about what is ecotourism, the advantages of having the site and give some examples of the ecotourism place. Our main purpose is to know if they want us to create an ecotourism site in their community. According to the interview, 96.4% agrees and 3.6% disagrees.
