Mountain Tourism Activities, Facilities and Perceived Community Livelihood Outcomes: A Case Study of Domestic Tourists at Mt. Kenya National Park

Mountain tourism is increasingly recognised as an important component of rural development and local community livelihood strategies. Although existing scholarship establishes the multidimensional nature of mountain tourism, few studies place facilities and activities within a single empirical model to compare their respective associations with domestic tourists’ perceptions of tourism-related community livelihood outcomes particularly in protected mountain destinations in Sub-Saharan Africa. This study compared the domestic tourists’ evaluations of mountain tourism activities and facilities with their perceptions of tourism-related community livelihood outcomes around Mt. Kenya National Park. The study was based on the Sustainable Livelihood Framework adopting a quantitative cross-sectional case-study design to collect primary data among 579 domestic tourists. Missing data were consistent with a Missing Completely At Random pattern (Little’s MCAR test) and 526 complete cases that were retained for analysis. Principal Component Analysis supported a refined 16-item, three-component structure. Multiple linear regression results showed that activities and facilities jointly explained 19.1% of the variance in domestic tourists’ perceptions of tourism-related community livelihood outcomes (F(2, 523) = 61.55, p < 0.001), and each component was positively and uniquely associated with the outcome (activities β = 0.190; facilities: β = 0.303; both p < 0.001). Although the facilities showed a larger standardised association, the difference between the two coefficients was not statistically significant. The findings highlight the complementary associations of mountain tourism facilities and activities with domestic tourists’ perceptions of tourism-related community livelihood outcomes around Mt. Kenya National Park. The study contributes to research on mountain tourism and sustainable livelihoods by providing comparative evidence from a protected mountain destination in Sub-Saharan Africa. It offers practical implications for infrastructure investment, destination planning, and community-centred tourism development. These findings suggest that mountain tourism destinations require policies and investment strategies that combine tourism infrastructure, integrated destination planning, and community participation in planning livelihood-oriented mountain tourism development.