| ARTICLES | Volume 1, Issue 8, Pages 280-293 (October 2015)

Review Article      FACILITIES AVAILABILITY AND TOURISTS’ SATISFACTION OF CULTURAL FESTIVALS IN EKITI STATE, NIGERIA          | Omotoba Nathaniel Ileri |. American Journal of Innovative Research and Applied Sciences. 2015; 1(8)280-293.          | PDF FULL TEXT |

ABSTRACT    Tourism can be described as a form of nomadism that characterised homosapiens, which is both normal and under the right conditions, pleasurable. Furthermore, they emphasized that tourism is associated with travelling away from one’s home for twenty four (24) hours, using one’s leisure time to travel and taking holidays and travelling for business. Being a world-wide phenomenon, it accounts for 10.3% of world gross domestic product, had a turnover of US$6,477.2 billion and supported 234 million jobs (8.7% of total world employment) amidst several challenges. Cultural Festival has been an important element of tourism, although not attended to like ecotourism sites, its impact cannot be overemphasised especially in Nigeria because of her diversified cultural characteristics. This paper thus examined the level of satisfaction of tourists and the influx of tourists in relation to the facilities available at various selected cultural festivals in Ekiti State, Nigeria. It critically examined the state of development of these cultural tourism sites and its impact on the general well-being of tourists and it looked into the problems militating against the sustainability of these festivals and ways forward for better tourists’ experiences. The Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Demand/Supply theory serve as the basis of its theoretical underpinning. The research work was carried out in three settlements using one festival each as case studies. The instrumentation for the study is the questionnaire thus one hundred and eighty (180) questionnaires were administered on target population. The administration of questionnaires was based on 2013 projected population and the multiple-regression statistical method of analysis was used to test for the relationship that existed between available facilities in host settlement of selected festivals/cultural tourism attractions and overall tourists’ satisfaction. The independent variables used were available facilities present at the host communities while the dependent variable is the overall satisfaction for tourists. The results shows that there is a positive relationship between available facilities in cultural festivals and overall tourists’ satisfaction thus, conclusively, an improvement in the available facilities will surely lead to increase in the level of tourists’ satisfaction which will in turn increase the rate of patronage of cultural tourism in the study area. Keywords: Quality Experiences, Tourism Demand, Tourism Supply, Amenities, Conceptualization.