Designing a heritage trail cycling routes based on tourism information : case study of Alor Setar town centre / Zainul Rijal Yeop

The purpose of this study is to plan an interesting heritage trail cycling route to enhance the heritage trail tourism sector in Alor Setar town and interesting activities for more dynamic tourist attractions. To produce this study, several steps are needed to produce a proposal that designs interesting heritage trail cycling routes by looking at the available trails available in heritage buildings that can be used as heritage trail cycling trails. An issue that has been identified for case studies in planning heritage trail bike cycling routes is the existing cycling lanes are not well dedicated for the heritage trail project and there is a lack of promoting strategy in heritage tourism attractions. Among the objectives of the study conducted to help resolve issues in this study area is to identify the distribution of heritage buildings, to investigate the existing pedestrian walkway for upgrading as the heritage trail cycling routes connecting to the heritage buildings and other attraction, and to propose master plan design an interesting heritage trail cycling routes concept for tourists coming to Alor Setar town. In addition, there are 3 elements to plan an interesting heritage trail cycling route, namely identifying heritage buildings in Alor Setar town, reviewing the criteria - tourist attraction criteria for heritage buildings and knowing the available pedestrian paths that can be upgraded to heritage cyclists for achieve the implementation targets of this study. Therefore, research is done to create data through primary sources, namely Inventory Form and Online information. Meanwhile, this study also uses secondary resources such as survey of government documents and online surveys such as Google maps and Google street view on the types of heritage buildings and routes available near tourist areas. Further, the data were analyzed to determine the priority level for tourist attractions in existing heritage tourism destinations. Research shows that there are 12 distributions of heritage buildings available in the study area determined with 5 categories of heritage buildings. The results of this study will also produce a graph of total ranking criteria for the potential tourist attraction of heritage buildings based on a mixture of 2 categories, namely historical value and environmental value. In this study will also issue an existing route plan that has cyclist lane features. This is because, this existing route plan will answer one of the objectives of the study which is to identify the existing route to be upgraded to a tourist bicycle route. Overall this study, will propose a master plan design for upgrading network facilities for tourists to focal point destination by highlighting the Heritage Trail concept. Therefore, several implementation agencies will be involved including the Malaysia @ Kedah Tourism Office, PLAN Malaysia @ Kedah, Alor Setar City Council (MBAS), and private agencies. It is hoped that this study can contribute to the increase in interesting tourism activities with the concept of heritage trails