Tourist Profile in the Urban Parish of Zaruma, Magical Town of Ecuador

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to determine the profile of the tourist in the urban parish of Zaruma, in order to know their behavior and motivations. At the same time, it aims to contribute to the planning and development of a tourism offer that meets the expectations and interests of national and international tourists visiting the locality. However, the problem revolves around the lack of knowledge of the current situation of tourism in the area; in addition, there is a lack of information on the tourist profile, which leads to a lack of knowledge about their behavior and motivations for tourism in the parish; added to this, the scarce supply of new tourism products created according to the characteristics of the tourist to improve the supply of the destination. Therefore, in the first objective, the methodology of Carla Ricaurte's Tourism Diagnosis of Communities was used, and for the survey of tourist attractions the methodology of the Ministry of Tourism (MINTUR) was used.  As a result, information was obtained from the tourism system, updating the inventory of 17 attractions, 82% of which corresponds to hierarchy III and the remaining 18% to hierarchy II.