Does a Memorable Experience Exist During the Covid-19 Pandemic? a Natural Attraction Study

 Abstract During Pandemic Covid-19, natural attractions have become one of the favourite places to visit even though there are various restrictions on movement and activities. Most of the visitors try to explore unforgettable visiting experiences during their visit. The research aims to understand whether visitors can access a memorable experience during the Covid-19 pandemic at natural tourist attractions. This research applied quantitative methods by using descriptive analysis from an online survey of 100 respondents who visited Situ Patenggang as one of the natural attractions from May to July 2021. As a result, visitors can still access several memorable experiences but lack several others. The highest dimension turns out to be refreshment from daily activities, then hedonism experience and uniqueness in novelty. They were then followed by interaction with local communities. In contrast, the third-lowest dimension is involved with activities, meaningfulness, and by Fifth is meaningfulness as a dimension


INTRODUCTION
The Covid-19 virus pandemic has caused a decline in gross domestic income from tourism globally to 3.7 per cent in 2021 (WTTC, 2021). Covid-19 is predicted to be with humans for a long time, and therefore it seems that tourism activities will not be the same for the time being . One example is the use of technology that reduces physical touch to reduce the impact of the spread (Suhaeni et al., 2022) and is believed to be able to create a different travel experience during the Covid-19 pandemic (Mateescu et al., 2020). Another example is the limitation of the number of visitors and the activities that can be done to reduce people's movement. In order to survive, most countries invent or modify new policies to adjust to the pandemic situation.
The Indonesian government has improved the policy from bringing in many tourists to improving the quality of the tourists themselves. One that the government of Indonesia is promoting is a quality travel experience by diversifying products/ services as competent implementers (Prabowo, 2021). Visitor satisfaction is determined by the experience they feel when visiting attractions (Yeh et al., 2019). A high-quality travel experience is essential for satisfying visitors, so destination operators need to improve the product/ services (Suhartanto et al., 2021). Even before Covid-19 creating memorable experiences was a positive challenge for destination operators (Subramaniam et al., 2019). The unique experience visitors feel will be unforgettable and leave a memorable experience in their minds (Sthapit, 2017).
Based on the concept of memorable tourism experience (MTE), the experience felt by visitors will impact other visit experiences in the future. Unforgettable experiences will still be remembered even after the tourist activities are completed, and this concept is also called MTE (Memorable Tourism Experiences) (Anggraeni, 2019). Currently, based on previous research, there are seven dimensions in the concept of MTE that need to be considered, namely 1) hedonism, 2) refreshment, 3) novelty, 4) local culture, 5) meaningfulness, 6) involvement, and 7) knowledge (Kim et al., 2021). The authors believed that the seven dimensions of MTE have not changed both before and during the Covid-19 pandemic period.
Based on the issues above, a big question arose "whether a memorable experience still exists during the Covid-19 pandemic". This research uses a case study of a natural attraction called Situ Patenggang, a natural tourist attraction in Bandung Regency, West Java, Indonesia. Natural tourist attractions include using natural resources in the scenery and water resources with vegetation and nature (Ceballos-Lascuráin, 1996). During Pandemic Covid-19, the natural attraction becomes one favourite place for visitors to do therapy after experiencing a lockdown (Ramadhian, 2020). One of the reasons is that visitors can minimize the spreading while they are outside in nature-based attractions (Dzulfa Putri Luthfiya et al., 2021;Lebrun et al., 2021).
Moreover, in 2020, there are still 471.329 people who visit nature-based attractions in West Java province (BPS, 2021). Situ Patenggang is a lake located in the highlands with an altitude of 1,600 above sea level and 60,000 hectares (Jabarprov.go.id, 2022). This lake is 47 km to the south of Bandung City, with a driving time of about 60-90 minutes (Jabarprov.go.id, 2022).

Natural-based Attraction
In general, natural attraction or nature-based tourism is a tourist activity that utilizes natural resources with relatively more minor development (Ceballos-Lascuráin, 1996). Nature tourism allows interaction between humans and nature (Y. . In line with this, (Wolf et al., 2019) describe that interaction activities containing an understanding between humans and the ecosystem where there are plants or animals from their visit are nature tourism. Natural sources that form the basis of natural-based attraction are divided into two factors, namely, physical and environmental. Among the physical factors present, namely water, mountains or animals, and vegetation, environmental factors include security, comfort, etc. (Deng et al., 2002).
Based on this definition, Situ Pattengang, a natural lake with mountainous air, is one of the natural tourist attractions suitable as a case study in this research.

Memorable Tourism Experiences
The idea of memorable experience was first proposed by Pine and Gilmore in 1999 and is considered one of sustainable competitive value in the future (Yu et al., 2019), and memorable experiences may bring a good perception for the individuals (Luca, 2018). This concept was developed later by (J.-H. Kim et al., 2012), defining memorable tourism experiences (MTE) as things that will always be remembered after a tourist visit. On the other hand, (Schmitt, 1997) stated that consumers are looking for experiences that can encourage them to interact personally, touch their hearts and invite them to think. Even MTE is considered to be able to help historic preferences so that they can invite visitors to come back (Sthapit, 2017). First is hedonism, as a dimension that refers to experiences that involve pleasure with multiple sensors from tourists/visitors, such as imaginative and emotional sensors (Coudounaris & Sthapit, 2017 (Coudounaris & Sthapit, 2017).
Sixth is involvement. According to Kim (J.-H. Kim et al., 2012) in (Coudounaris & Sthapit, 2017), the involvement dimension can be interpreted as the involvement of visitors in tourism activities that can awaken a person's ability to remember an experience. The last is knowledge. The knowledge dimension can be interpreted as knowledge gained by visitors during their travels, and both special and general knowledge related to attractions can be in the form of history, culture, habits, traditional cuisine, and architecture (Kuusimäki, 2018 (Sugiyono, 2014). According to (Rasjidi, 2017), the selection of research methods is to find goals for the answers to the problems found. This study uses descriptive analysis to illustrate the data found without trying to generalize the data (Jaya, 2019).  The table above shows that the profile of most respondents is women with a high school education level.

Profile of the Respondents
Respondents have the most jobs, namely students with the most income from respondents of under one million rupiahs. Both of these things are supported by research from (Mahdzar, 2019), (Utama, 2019), and (Verinita, 2016) that women mostly make the average tourist visit at a young age range. (Verinita, 2016) stated that 40% of visitors to Situ Pategang are students and have an income of less than 1 million. As for the originating area, this result supports the concept of distance decay, in which the closest area will dominate, only to gradually decrease based on the distance (Hooper, 2015;McKercher, 2008 pandemic, these visitors tend to be more accessible and less worried about imposed restrictions.

Memorable Tourism Experiences
In discussing whether MTE still exists during the Covid-19 pandemic in a natural tourist attraction, this paper asks directly from seven dimensions with a total of 16 questions which are briefly described in the table below. Based on the first dimension, namely hedonism, the number shows 3.09 with a standard deviation of .568.
This means that visitors have a pleasant experience of having new experiences, one of which is enjoying the natural scenery and community activities in Situ Patenggang. Here visitors still get positive energy on the sidelines of movement restrictions during the pandemic. It could be that this pleasant experience was triggered by their limited activities, such as the lack of opportunities for visitors to carry out tourism activities directly during the pandemic. The same thing also happened in the second dimension, namely novelty, with a mean of 3.06 and a standard deviation of .575. This means that visitors can feel they have a unique experience that is not felt outside of a pandemic. One of them is by travelling while implementing health protocols. Visitors also get another experience by interacting with residents during the pandemic. Glancing at the research before the The third dimension also relates to the COVID-19 phenomenon, namely local culture. This dimension is relatively high because, during the Covid-19 pandemic, visitors rarely interact directly with other people, even new people during the pandemic. The ability to interact becomes weak enough to interact with residents becomes very impressive for visitors. Viewed from the side of this refreshment, it is very related because physical limitations to avoid viruses give an excellent impression to visitors. Visitors can release fatigue and get new energy to carry out daily routine activities during this COVID-19 pandemic. Natural characteristics with beautiful lake views and cool weather support the refreshment dimension of daily activities. Visitors also feel that they get peace of mind. The results obtained are the same as (Verinita, 2016) Judging from the meaningfulness dimension that gets the smallest value, visitors feel they can develop themselves from the visit results. This is quite different from research from Utama (Utama, 2019) in the tourist village of Sumber Maron, in which this dimension gets a high score above the average. Even though visitors feel they can strengthen their relationship with their family and their relationship with each other when they visit, they cannot carry out more profound activities during the Covid-19 Pandemic. These findings are almost similar to the latest study from (Hosseini et al., 2021) that the MTEs impact how tourists behave and create intentions to visit again by participating in activities including promotions on their own.
The data are pretty supportive but somewhat different from previous research, which is seen in the dimensions of involvement and knowledge. Even though the pandemic lasted quite a long, the high spread level still made visitors want to do tourism activities and get involved in it. The average result of the involvement dimension is still in the high category. It could be because nature tourism has become a favourite destination so that visitors' involvement and information are eagerly awaited. In contrast to previous studies, which had a very high mean, it could be due to restrictions and the application of health protocols, and there were not many activities that could involve visitors, and the information obtained changed rapidly and varied greatly.

CONCLUSION
In general, the results of this study answer the research objectives discussed from the beginning that MTEs  (Suhaeni et al., 2022).
This research cannot be generalized to other tourist attractions but can be used to refer to the concept of memorable tourism experiences in supporting tourism sustainability from an experience perspective. One emerging topic is MTE in dark tourism or ecological-related tourism setting (Hosseini et al., 2021). Another weakness of this paper is that it only uses one lake tourist attraction as a case study and only discusses it from the visitor's point of view. Other researchers can compare several types of natural tourist attractions and pay attention to the answers from the management or tourism business actors to enrich the answers from various sides.