Community involvement is emerging as a key element of both sustainable tourism and ecotourism. Community involvement in decision-making and residents’ receipt of benefits from tourism is expected to play a vital role in sustainable tourism as well as preservation and conservation of biodiversity. Local communities living in the forest areas of Dandeli suffered a great neglect economically in th...

In-water viewing of sharks by tourists has become a popular and lucrative industry. There is some concern that interactions with tourists with ecotourism operations might harm sharks through disruption of behaviours. Here, we analysed five years of whale shark (Rhincodon typus) encounter data by an ecotourism industry at Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia, to assess the impact of ecotourism inter...

Ecotourism spatial planning requires the balance of both development and conservation. Through environmental data analysis, many researchers have suggested spatial planning that falls between these two polarizing concepts. Nonetheless, ecotourism development has been criticized as inconsiderate of places that are precious to local residents. The purpose of this study is to map local stakeholder...

Tourist satisfaction, as a principal element for sustainable development of wetland ecotourism and destination competitiveness, has received extensive attention in the research on its impact behavioral intention. This paper employs choice experiment to study tourist satisfaction an important motivation intention willingness pay preference improvement policy, explores potential causal mechanism....

GIS can be used in tourism as a decision supporting tool for sustainable tourism planning, impact assessment, visitor flow management, and tourism site selection. Therefore, the potential for GIS applications in tourism is significant. The purpose of the study was fixed to explore the potential of using GIS for planning resources pertinent to ecotourism development. The study investigated a cas...

a r t i c l e i n f o Recreation and wildlife observations occur often in hiking trails. In terms of recreation planning, few studies have combined ecological and cultural features to assess ecotourism potential of hiking trails. Seasonality has been also neglected in tourism research. In order to disperse tourists over the year and alleviate the negative impacts of mass tourism events, we prop...

The County of Khorram-Abad enjoys a high potential for ecotourism because of its mountains, forests, natural mineral springs, natural waterfalls and diversity in folks and cultures. But, un-planned and uncontrolled ecotourism can have negative effects on environment, economy, culture and even the security of eco-tourists. The main purpose of this study is to present a fuzzy multi-criteria decis...

The transfer of knowledge in an ecotourism project is never a one-way affair. An approach connected to bottom-up development is the submersion into another culture, while creating a new organizational structure. For co-creation, patterns that are often latent, such as leadership roles, the association with business, or even the color of education can be revealed by carefully facilitated brainst...

The importance of environmental responsibility in tourism is widely accepted. Two main paradigms have emerged: ecotourism – a demand-driven concept limited to nature-based tourism and sustainable tourism – a supply-sided view characterized by industry regulations. Unfortunately, ecotourism is limited in size, and supply-sided measures implicitly contradict the short-term aim of profit-maximizat...

Ecotourism can be an incentive for conservation, especially when it triggers positive economic change. Yet it introduces many changes to communities:positive and negative, social and economic. The full range of change is seldom evaluated in direct relation to conservation at the local level. In this study of three Amazon ecotourism projects, local leaders discussed changes from ecotourism in th...