Proceedings of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies, Vol.8, 2011 Study of Sightseeing Bus Service for Tourists on the Rattanakosin Island in Bangkok Jittichai RUDJANAKANOKNAD* Peerasan Rattanasuwan Assistant Professor Graduate Student Department of Civil Engineering Department of Civil Engineering Faculty of Engineering Faculty of Engineering Chulalongkorn University Chulalongkorn University Phayatai Road, Patumwan, Bangkok Patumwan, Bangkok 10330, Thailand 10330 Thailand Fax: +66-2-251-7304 Fax: +66-02-251-7304 E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected] Abstract: This manuscript presents the analysis of tourists’ demand and preferences regarding sightseeing bus service in the Rattanakosin Island area, an old town of Bangkok. Initially, there was a sightseeing bus service running through major attractions in the area; however, it was closed down by Bangkok Government due to unpopularity and some legal issues. This study’s objectives are to understand tourists’ demands and attitudes for the service and to seek an appropriate sightseeing bus service that could satisfy them. It was done through a survey of 105 Thai and 105 foreign tourists around the area. It was found that both groups of tourists are interested in using the service. However, they prefer different service arrangements, i.e., Thai tourists prefer a tram-like vehicle with a shorter travel time and less expensive fare; however, the foreign ones like a more comfortable vehicle with longer trip time and higher fare. In conclusion, two distinct types of service would be developed for each tourist group due to their different preferences. The findings from this research stresses the importance of tourist-based transportation study that would help tour operators and city governments to better plan travel and sightseeing service for tourists in a city. Key Words: Sightseeing Bus; Public Transportation; Tourist Behavior; Travel Behavior 1. INTRODUCTION A sightseeing bus is a type of public transportation service particularly designed for tourists in a specific area. It might be complemented with other related services like a tour guide for providing assistance, historical and contemporary heritage interpretation to tourists on the bus. This service could be found in many world’s tourist cities, e.g., London, Paris, Singapore, etc. The service’s type and vehicles used could be varied depending on the city government’s requirements, concept of transport operators, and demand of tourists. The study of this issue in transportation context has been very limited. In fact, the knowledge of sightseeing bus service lies between two distinct research areas: the bus transportation service and tourists’ behaviors. The former area includes a variety of literature in transportation field. However, the study of bus service in transportation field is mainly concentrated on an urban commuter bus, or an intercity bus. These buses are mainly for commuters not for tourists. They tend to focus on how the bus can reach the destination efficiently with passengers’ satisfaction. However, for sightseeing bus service, efficiency might not be the main design issue. Often, the origin and destination of the service could be the same point. Hence, the knowledge of bus transport could not be directly applied for Proceedings of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies, Vol.8, 2011 sightseeing bus. To design a sightseeing bus service, the knowledge of tourists’ behaviors and their preferences is required. In the literature, there are numerous researches regarding tourists’ behaviors; then again, few of them have touched on their intra-city transportation services. With the lack of relevant knowledge regarding the sightseeing service, the design and operations of service would depend very much on operators’ experiences and might not satisfy actual tourist needs. This study’s objectives are to understand tourists’ demands and attitudes for the service and to seek the most appropriate type of sightseeing transportation services that could satisfy them. In this study, the Rattanakosin Island area in Bangkok was selected as a study site. The Rattanakosin Island is regarded as the most historically important area in Bangkok. This area was developed by King Rama I of Thailand since the Bangkok’s inception as a capital of Thailand in 1782. The area is not actually a natural island but its “island” name was from being surrounded by Chao Phaya River and several man-made canals for preventing the capital center from foreign invaders in the past. This area of 4.142 sq.km. can be divided into two parts. The inner area covers the Grand Palace, while the outer ring includes old civilian communities, government buildings, monuments and several legendary Buddhist temples such as Wat Pra Kaew, Wat Pho, etc (Asiamuseum, 2010 and Rattanakosin Island’s Data Center, 2003). To date, there have been more than 1.8 million visitors annually (Bureau of the Royal Household, 2010). More than half of them are foreign travelers. To serve tourists in the area, the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority (BMA) introduced a sightseeing bus service in 2000. The bus used during that day was a regular small one. Later in 2008, the service was revised into a tram-like bus with several offered routes and BMA called it a “Rattanakosin Island’s Tram”. At last, this service was closed down due to unpopularity and some legal problems in June 2010. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section two summarizes the related background researches. The summary of past sightseeing operations is described in Section 3. Section 4 describes the methods used to collect demand and attitudes’ data from tourists. Data analysis and interpretation are shown in Section 5. Concluding remarks and areas of further research are described in Section 6 and the final section. 2. LITERATURE REVIEW This section reviews past research pertaining to sightseeing bus services. The first subsection will begin with the reviews of sightseeing bus services in many tourist cities. Later, tourists’ behaviors that could affect their choice of sightseeing service are described in the following subsection. Sightseeing Bus Services in Tourist Cities There have been a variety of sightseeing services for tourists in tourist cities. Major types of this service are bus tour, tram, boat, etc. The city patterns, its road and canal network, and locations of tourist attractions influence the services available for tourists. In this research, the focus is on a sightseeing bus service only. Note that some of these buses have been specially modified to look like a tram, so that it would draw the attention of tourists. Table 1 below shows the characteristics of sightseeing bus services available in some selected tourist cities. Table 1: Sightseeing bus services in selected cities Proceedings of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies, Vol.8, 2011 Headway Days of Fare Vehicle City Reference (mins) operations (USD) Type Adult $5.3 Nagoya, Japan 20-30 Tue-Sun AC bus NCVB (2010) (Child $2.7) Adult $40 London, U.K. 15 Bigbus-tour (2010) (Child $20) Daytime $43.3 DiscoverHongKong Paris, France 15-30 Double- Night $26.7 (2010) Mon-Sun decker Adult $17.7 Hong Kong, China 30 City Sightseeing (2010) (Child $8.3) bus Adult $41.7 Singapore 15 Travelsignposts (2010) (Child $20) From Table 1, buses used in the sightseeing service include regular air-conditioned (AC) and double-decker buses. The advantage of a double-decker bus is that passengers could have a choice between sitting in an air-conditioned lower deck and going up to an open air upper deck for enjoying a greater view and taking photos. Currently, two sightseeing bus operators have dominated the service for many cities. City Sightseeing Worldwide, a U.K. company, has operated double-decker sightseeing bus service on more than 80 cities, including 33 in U.K., 49 in other European countries, and 12 in the rest of the world (City Sightseeing, 2010), Gray Line Worldwide, one of the largest sightseeing tour operators, has offered sightseeing tours in almost 150 cities on all continents. The service extends from sightseeing bus tours to adventure experiences, overnight tours, etc (Grey Line, 2010). There are two major types of sightseeing bus services in terms of tourist styles. First, the hop- on-hop-off is the service allowing tourists to alight and board the vehicles at any stop to visit attractions along the bus route within a specified time period with the same ticket. For the full-circle service, tourists must stay on the bus through the end of the routes. If tourists decide to get out of the bus at any stop, they have to repurchase the ticket for re-boarding. However, the hop-on-hop-off is more popular and all sightseeing buses shown in Table 1 opt for this type of service. Through the route, the service could include tour guide, or multi-language audio tour to describe historic or cultural values of the attractions. In addition, for tourists’ comfort and convenience, several services have been added. Examples are advance ticket purchase, seat reservation, combination packages with other services, etc. Sightseeing bus service plays an important role for tourist satisfaction since it takes tourists to several attractions in the area with a reasonable price. It could draw tourists to other complementary services. In addition, it might symbolize the attractions and the city due to its unique design and operations. For transportation context, sightseeing bus service is one of ridesharing forms, reducing traffic congestion in the preserved area. More usage of this service would lead to the reduction of greenhouse gas emission and slowing down the settlement or collapse of sensitive historic area due to traffic (Banmuang, 2007). Tourist Behaviors towards Sightseeing Service Choice There have been few literatures related to the sightseeing bus service. Lumsdon (2006) studies factors affecting the design of tourism bus service. The method in this study was the in-depth interviews of 51 practitioners involved in the design of tourist bus services in the U.K.