Developing Touring Plan Using Geographic Information System Based on Visual, Natural, and Cultural Quality in Parangtritis Coastal Area, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Abstract

Parangtritis is one of tourist destination place in Indonesia that is visited by plenty of visitors because of its local legend of Kanjeng Ratu Kidul and its beautiful landscape and scenery of beach, as well as many other varieties of tourism objects, which are rarely including in a touring system that can serve the visitors with informative and recreative interpretation within the current tourism management. The objective of this study is studying on developing a touring plan in coastal area of Parangtritis based on its visual, natural, and cultural quality assessment. Those three aspects of quality are used as the basic consideration for site assessment in acquiring the potential tourism area, which is subsequently used in developing a touring system. Scenic Beauty Estimation (SBE) and visual character variables assessment are used in assessing the visual quality of the study area. The technique of potential zones mapping applied by Gunn (1994) combined with cartographic regionalization (Smith, 1989) are used in assessing both natural and cultural quality of the area. GIS technology is used in this study, especially to perform spatial analysis in integrating those three resources assessments to obtain a composite result considered as potential tourism area. The assessments of the study area explain that Parangtritis Area has a good quality of visual, natural, and cultural resources that are potential to be developed as tourism resources and attractions. In general, Parangtritis is dominated with high to medium quality of potential area for tourism, which includes beach, sand dunes, woodlands, and a big part of agricultural area. Based on those potential area and existing tourism objects, there are three touring alternatives that have been developed in this study by using the concept of developing an interpretive track, as adopted from Damayanti (2003). The first touring alternative is developed by visiting all the potential nodes without classifying the tourism resources. The second one is developed by classifying the visited stops based on natural and cultural tourism resources, and the last alternative is developed by focusing on the conservation values of the natural factors of coastal environment, spiritual cultural resources, and the traditional livelihood of the local community. According to the prioritizing process using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, Touring Alternative 3, which has the highest priority for the criteria of educational benefits, is perceived to be the most preferable alternative as the potential tourism network in Parangtritis Coastal Area.