Tourist Interests as a Basis for Post-Covid-19 Pandemic Tourism Visit Recovery Planning: Studies in the Ecotourism Area of Way Kambas National Park, Lampung Province

Ecotourism is expected to revive in the post COVID-19 pandemic, as currently the lowland conservation area with the highest biodiversity in the world is Way Kambas National Park, Lampung province, Indonesia. Attractiveness is the main variable as the basis for planning the restoration of tourist visit performance. The purpose of this study was to determine the role of the country of origin variable and demographics of respondents in the attractiveness of ecotourism objects in WKNP. As a result, from May 2022 to August 2022, a 15-minute video about the exoticism of WKNP had been uploaded on the https://research-mil.unila.ac.id/ site. At the end of the video, a questionnaire is presented in Indonesian, English, French, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic. The Ordinal Logistic Regression Postulate is used at the 95% confidence level. There are three levels of response variables that score 0, 1, and 2 to express not interested, interested, and very interested in visiting WKNP, respectively. The predictor variable is the respondent’s characteristics, which include the respondent’s origin, age, gender, number of dependents, income, and professional group. Optimization of model parameters and hypothesis testing were carried out at a 95% significance level using Minitab 19 software. The results showed that the attractiveness of visiting was influenced by: (a) country of origin, 33.09 times more foreign respondents compared to domestic ones with P = 0.037; (b) those who are 1 year older have a higher attractiveness, namely 1.06 times; and (c) whose professions as teachers, civil servants, and professional workers are lower, namely only 0.08 times, 0.09 times, and 0.14 times compared to housewives or students. The policy implications for redeveloping plans to improve tourist interest in visiting WKNP need to be focused on prospective tourists from abroad, with the main target being professions other than civil service employees. Keywords: demographic, overseas, post-pandemic, and logistic ordinal regressio