Sustainability of Nature: The Power of the Type of Visitors

Abstract

Nature tourism has a strong potential, and as a result of this tourism activity, the environmental concern is considered an important element which guides business and tourism activity. This element also generates the change in the society's behaviour, in order to conciliate economic and political interest with the environmental ones, with the final aim to guarantee the existence of these resources in the future and the tourism competitiveness of these natural areas. To get this purpose of sustainable development, in the case of natural areas where it is difficult to control the carrying capacity because the access is uncontrolled in them, it is important to attract visitors which are identify with the destination, its resources and what it has to offer. In this way the visitors have a behavior at the destination that will help to achieve its sustainability. In this sense, the segmentation has an important role in the development, management and success of a natural area in a competitive tourism environment. Because the segmentation allows knowing visitors, their preference, wishes and needs, and it makes easy the adjustment of supply. At the same time, this activity allows to lead the communication actions of a tourism destination or area toward the visitors who are identified with the destination offers. This guarantees the sustainability of destination over time. The purpose of this paper it is to identify visitors who have a behavior and interest in protected natural areas, and who will be consider as appropriate target to direct the promotion to encourage their visit. This paper includes the analysis of the type of visitors in the area of Serranía Alta de Cuenca, in Spain, according to their features, the type of travel and their opinion about the destination. This study provides relevant information to guide the management of tourism activity in this area. Latent Gold 4.5  is the statistical software used to make the segmentation. This technique is different from other by its strict statistical formulation which puts the visitors into group by the probability of belonging to each segment.

Segmentation of Ecotourism Demand in a National Recreation Area: The Samanes Park Case, Ecuador

“…From the theoretical perspective, the present study establishes a similarity to the groups found by Cordente-Rodríguez et al (2014), who establish two segments that are referred to as group 1 "Los naturalistas", similar to the "ecotourists" of the present study and group 2 "multiple motivations", very similar to what was called "multi tourists" motivations" of the present investigation. However, in the Samanes recreation area there was a group called "Indifferent tourists" with average scores on the motivational variables, focusing this group of tourists visiting this area on other motivations not studied as part of ecotourism.…”

Rural Tourism: Development, Management and Sustainability in Rural Establishments

“…From the point of view of the demand, tourists have access to an ever-increasing number of proposals that include environmentally responsible experiences [13,14]. Moreover, in terms of the supply, there is not a lot of scientific literature, fundamentally caused by the small size of many of the companies operating in this sector.…”

Perception of Sustainability of Spanish National Parks: Public Use, Tourism and Rural Development

“…The proposed model was analysed by modelling structural equations using Partial Least Squares (PLS). This is one of the most used methodologies when the cause-effect relationships need to be analysed [7,64,65] since it informs us of the sign and intensity of these relationships. A PLS path model consists in two components.…”

“…This country has 15 National Parks that represent 0.76% of its territory. Likewise, this figure is the best known by society among all the protection categories and has a great tourist attraction, registering millions of visits annually [7,8]. Furthermore, Spanish National Parks represent exceptional environments with their own culture and biological personality, due to the authenticity of their resources, which is one of the country's distinguishing characteristics [9].…”