Ecological tourism public marketing: responses to grand challenges

Abstract

The paper is dedicated to some aspects of ecological tourism development. Under the conditions of revenue and tourist flow decrease because of the global quarantine restrictions, border closure and global downturn, as well as reduction in personal income, searching new ways of loss minimization is essential to the further development of travel industry. For this purpose, it is proposed to consider new travel offers, which can be on-trend under the conditions of a pandemic. Ecotourism can become such kind of tourism because of a wish of tourists to visit precisely natural objects under the conditions of restricted access to nature and environment in case of a lockdown. Moreover, an urgent issue of global development is ecology and environment protection. Combining socio-economic and ecologic priorities of public development, we have analysed the prospects for further development of ecological tourism as a trend of domestic tourism at the national level. Special losses due to the containment measures are suffered by the countries which had the highest fraction of income from tourism in the structure of the national GDP. Thus, the potential of these countries in terms of prospects for ecotourism development was determined. The geographical location of ecotourism destination was analysed. The analyse shows that these countries can develop and propose attractive for tourists offers of ecotourism in the domestic tourism market. To ensure their promotion, the elements have been identified and an algorithm for the public marketing of domestic ecological tourism offers has been developed.