Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism-Research Planning and Management最新文献

This paper presents findings from a study that examined how well mountain bikers' cognitive processes predicted their recommendation intent—the intention to share their recreation experience with others. Specifically, we examined relationships between different mountain biking recreation goal appraisals, emotions, and mountain bikers’ intentions to suggest mountain biking destinations to others. We tested hypothesized relationships using a structural equation modeling approach. Our results show that goal congruence and interest are the primary appraisal factors predicting recommendation intent among mountain bikers. While satisfaction and affective emotions are distinct factors that affect post-trip recommendation behavior, our results suggest that satisfaction emotions are significant secondary predictors of recommendation intent and have a stronger relationship with post-trip recommendation intentions than affective emotions. These study outcomes may be used to inform and develop effective management strategies for mountain biking destinations by designing based on user experiences.

Study implications for management

The study underscores the crucial need to tailor mountain biking trails to align with bikers' recreational aspirations and abilities, emphasizing the importance of offering diverse experiences suited to different skill levels. Instead of the typical strategy to grow biking destinations by expanding trail networks, managers should prioritize aligning trail experiences with bikers' expectations and desires to boost competitiveness. Strategic investments in trail infrastructure and services, coupled with feedback systems to gauge changing needs and satisfaction levels, are critical. Collaborating with local biking groups can enhance understanding and adaptability to evolving preferences. Continuous efforts to personalize trail experiences based on bikers' preferences are essential for garnering positive feedback, ensuring enduring enjoyment, and sustaining the appeal and growth of mountain biking destinations.

Avitourism and avitourists are more frequently characterized by intense photography. Although discussions on wildlife photography are not new, few have explained the meanings behind photo-sharing. Drawing on the concept of photograph as trophy, we interviewed 26 Chinese avitourists across a wide specialisation spectrum. From casual to advanced avitourists, we found that the stories behind the photos, the particularity of species, and the sophistication of photography techniques are the defining qualities of trophy-like photos. Sharing such photos, like conservation photographs, indicates co-existence and amicable encounters with nature. These photos may be used to communicate high social status. The finer the photos were made, the stronger the implications that they are costly, pro-environmental, and produced with the assistance of power. Importantly, pro-environmentalism implicitly communicates a sense of altruism and cultural capital, which enables status signalling. Such photos can contribute to the reinforcement and competition of status, which thereby catalyses cheating and other deviant photography actions. Such deviance is reversely justified with the positive pro-environmental birder image. Excavating such multi-faceted meanings of bird photos may help explain bird photo-taking and sharing, and provide implications for involving birders in protected land management.

Managerial implications

Status signalling can help manage birders communities. As deviance like baiting for photography is driven by the desire for status signalling, on-site regulations on bird photography tours are needed for the short run. In the long term, it is important to incorporate ethical guidelines in birding tour operations and promote compliance with the ethical code of conduct as a socially superior practice. Additionally, leveraging social status can be achieved by creating platforms for avitourists to showcase their photos and gain recognition. This may encourage the participation of knowledge experts who demand status signalling into anti-deviance promotion, environmental education, and protected land management.

Camping experiences have long been regarded as transformative, fostering not only a connection to the natural environment but also intricate social dynamics among participants. While existing literature recognizes the significance of camping experiences in shaping individual and collective well-being, there remains a critical research gap regarding the specific influence of campers' co-production on family cohesion, place identity, and resilience. This paper explores the direct positive influence of campers' co-production on family cohesion, place identity, and resilience, while also examining the mediating role of place identity in shaping connections between campers' co-production and family cohesion, as well as resilience. Purposive sampling was utilized to survey voluntary visitors at five representative camping sites across northern, central, and southern Taiwan, resulting in a collection of 826 valid questionnaires. This study finds that campers' co-production has a positive influence on family cohesion, place identity, and resilience. Moreover, campers’ place identity has a positive influence on family cohesion and resilience. Furthermore, the mediating role of place identity in shaping connections between campers' co-production and family cohesion, as well as resilience, is supported. By unraveling these dynamics, the research contributes both theoretical insights into the specific connections within the camping context and practical implications for designing camping programs that enhance familial and individual well-being.

Recent trail development has been motivated by sustainable tourism destination principles, suggesting a paradigm incorporating an eco-cultural trail concept. As with conventional trails, eco-cultural trail destination governance necessitates coordinated development and management of all landscape elements, emphasizing and protecting cultural and natural assets. This research aims to provide a sustainable strategy for developing eco-cultural trails, applying a qualitative approach and stakeholder participation. Two focus groups and a workshop were conducted involving stakeholders representing governmental agencies, private enterprises, academic experts, students, and environmental organizations. A case study trail “Seven Hanging Valleys” was used in this study to develop an eco-cultural trail development and management strategy. Natural and cultural landscapes, trail infrastructure, trail visitor experience, and marketing and collaboration were the examined dimensions. Based on stakeholders’ visions, a destination development and management plan was established, aligning the environmental objectives to preserve natural and cultural assets, with improved overall experience for travellers and the community.

Management implications

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  Community collaboration provides trail managers and policymakers with a framework that identifies the essential levels of investment, programming, and management required to assist trails in becoming more economically and socially driven.

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  The proposed management plan for eco-cultural trails can assist landscape managers with indicated management priorities when developing eco-cultural trails that aim to respect natural and cultural assets and provide memorable trail-related experiences.

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  The process of creating a stakeholders' shared vision for the sustainable development of the trail site provides trail managers with a better understanding of existing and future threats and allows them to future-proof trail maintenance and service plans.

The health and well-being benefits of nature contact are inequitably distributed. Among other communities, persons with a disability have fewer opportunities to engage in nature contact in a self-determining way due to the presence of interlocking physical, informational, service, policy, and attitudinal barriers. The purpose of this project was to utilize accepted accessibility standards to document the state of accessibility in nature based tourism and recreation spaces across British Columbia. Following community-based research practices, a team of academic researchers and experts working in accessibility practice collected over 6,700 unique measurements documenting potential barriers across 124 outdoor tourism and recreation sites. Of the 974 infrastructure elements and features assessed, fewer than five percent met all required standards. This paper shares evidence about the categories of infrastructure that are most problematic from an access and inclusion perspective, as well as those that are comparable brightspots. Results demonstrate a considerable gap between Canada's policy goal to become barrier free by 2040 and the present state of accessibility in outdoor spaces across the nature continuum.

Management Implications

Organizations managing outdoor tourism and recreation spaces across the nature continuum in British Columbia, Canada are not meeting interrelated moral, legislative, and social demands for equitable access to nature. Management agencies should invest in data collection completed in partnership with the disability community to reveal the full suite of barriers that prevent access across the province. New capital investment programs are required to upgrade legacy infrastructure and realize new features and amenities that provide meaningful opportunities to all. To ensure accessibility does not diminish over time, changes in management practices like incorporating accessibility requirements into operational contracting, hiring for lived experience, and building accessibility monitoring into maintenance planning and operations are needed.

Nature-based destinations started to become objects of travel for various visitor segments during the COVID-19 pandemic. The changing environment and the travel conditions influence overall visitor satisfaction and its determinants. This study identifies the role of tangible and intangible factors in forming overall visitor satisfaction with a stay in a nature-based tourism destination and their changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A Generalized Linear Model with a logit link function was used to identify the significant satisfiers and to determine the factors that play a critical role in visitor satisfaction in the during-COVID era compared to the pre-COVID period. The results show that intangible satisfiers play a more significant role than tangible ones in the COVID time. Surprisingly, natural features are insignificant in explaining overall satisfaction at a nature-based destination in the during-COVID in comparison with the pre-COVID period. In contrast, active sports options have become a significant satisfier in the COVID era. This comparison results contribute to the current theory, and the findings indicate the practical implications for Destination Management Organisations regarding sustainable tourism development.

Management implications

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  Destination Management Organisations (DMO) in nature-based destinations should become more conscious of changing visitor structures concerning destination satisfaction.

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  DMOs could focus more on promoting activities such as active sports options and tourism infrastructure than natural features regarding current visitor preferences; however, sustainability should be a fundamental goal of competitive tourism destinations.

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  There is a need to carefully deal with the expanding tourism infrastructure development and prevent uncontrolled growth of commercial activities and attractions that would act against the interests of residents and endanger the value of the natural environment.

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  DMOs should educate the changing visitors about the importance of responsible tourism.

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  DMOs should focus on environmental-friendly activities which do not negatively impact nature in terms of using land and natural areas for commercial activities and construction.

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  DMOs should make efforts to attract their environmental sensitive pre-COVID visitors and target new segments searching for health and sustainability, such as the Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) segment and the Free Independent Travellers (FIT).

Amidst the dynamic transformations in the camping industry, research on efficiency and performance remains surprisingly scarce. This research aims to evaluate the efficiency of campsites in France, to determine the best managerial practices from the perspective of different business models.

A deductive approach is adopted to explore performance measurement based on a convenience sample of 52 campsites located in France. A Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is combined with a Cluster Analysis (CA) to explore the organizational performance of each business model cluster.

The paper offers an organized structure to measure campsite business model efficiency, identify benchmarks, obtain KPIs per cluster, policymaker recommendations, and counter-intuitive findings for state-owned campsites. Focusing on continuous improvement, campsites with superior relative efficiency serve as benchmarks for others, offering best practices that can be adopted to increase effectiveness.

Findings show considerable variability in terms of performance scores, with campsites proposing fewer attractive resources experiencing major inefficiencies and profitability problems. In contrast, nature-oriented luxury (glamping) campsites with few intrinsic attractive and efficient resources manage to achieve an average EBITDA of around 31%. Furthermore, the results provide valuable information for political decision-makers concerning the support and public financial assistance required for the favorable development of campsites located in unattractive territories. For this industry, it is crucial to support business models that make a significant contribution to tourism attractiveness and economic sustainability. An encouraging perspective for the recovery and safeguarding of the thousand campsites closed in France this last decade.

In the past few years, more human-wildlife conflicts have occurred as a result of increased human visitations, particularly in areas where space is scarce and functions need to co-exist. Nature organisations are increasingly challenged to improve nature protection on the one hand, while offering visitors high quality nature experiences on the other hand. To encourage both go hand in hand, nudging has recently received more attention. Nudging is a tool to subtly change human behaviour without imposing strict rules. It is, however, hardly applied in nature areas. Currently, experiments are taking place in the Dutch part of the Wadden Sea with alternating signage (nudging message based on real-time data of the area) aided by a tidal information pillar to encourage dynamic zoning. At low tide the signage indicates: freely accessible, at high tide the advice: ‘do not enter’. The purpose is to address visitors' sense of responsibility, nudge pro-environmental behaviour and reduce human-wildlife conflicts by limiting access. This article assesses the effectiveness of the alternating nudging signage, and especially the effectiveness of the signage ‘high tide – do not enter’. The results show that the signage on the pillar is most effective when visitors stop at the pillar and read the advice. Among these visitors, about half turn around. Among the visitors who do not encounter the signage and the pillar, the majority goes on to access the area. With this study, we aim to contribute to the knowledge on nudging as a tool to promote pro-environmental behaviour in nature areas.

Coral reefs in Oman boast remarkable biodiversity and distinct features, yet their economic contribution remains largely unexplored, making this topic seriously under-researched. This study addresses this gap by aiming to estimate the recreational value of ecosystem services offered by natural and artificial coral reefs along Oman's coastline, a valuable asset that falls under the category of public goods that has never been assessed. Moreover, the study delves into the impact of varying reef richness levels, indicating biodiversity levels, on overall recreational value in this seldom-studied region with significant coral reef resources. Notably, this research marks the first attempt in the literature to examine the influence of different richness levels of reefs on recreational value. A survey was conducted to evaluate the recreational value of ecosystem services provided by coral reefs using Travel Cost Method. Coral reefs are found to provide an annual consumer surplus of 187,763 OMR (about 487,727 USD), emphasizing their substantial economic value. Greater biodiversity within a reef corresponds to a higher preference among recreationists, leading to increased economic benefits and enhanced consumers satisfaction. The substantial increase in recreational demand at sites with high reef richness levels underscores the importance of these ecosystems not just for their intrinsic natural value but also for their contribution to the tourism sector. It is essential for decision-makers to focus on the preservation of existing coral reefs as a primary concern, prior to contemplating the creation of additional reefs to enhance marine tourism.

Managerial implications

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  Coral reefs not only draw more recreationists but also significantly enhance consumer surplus and satisfaction

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  The richer the biodiversity of a reef, the more it is preferred, deriving greater economic value and consumer satisfaction

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  Oman's coral reefs provide a consumer surplus of 187,762.955 OMR (487,726.84 USD), emphasizing their economic significance

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  Policymakers should prioritize maintaining existing coral reefs before considering the development of new ones

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  Conserving and enhancing coral reefs is crucial for ecological and economic reasons, benefiting tourism-related activities

Crowding and congestion in parks and protected areas can prompt visitors to use behavioral coping strategies, including intra-site spatial displacement, where visitors rearrange themselves spatially within a recreation destination, seeking unoccupied areas. To date, intra-site displacement has primarily been measured using aspatial survey, interview, or observational methods. Using an explicitly spatial approach combining GPS tracking of visitor groups and concurrently collected estimates of use, we hypothesized a pattern of spatial spreading characteristic of intra-site displacement as use levels increased at three popular day hiking recreation destinations in Yosemite National Park, USA. Using nearest neighbor hierarchical cluster analysis, we quantified patterns in spatial behavior data collected at low, moderate, and high use times at each location. We used three measures of spatial behavior (time spent in all clusters, time spent in entry portal clusters, and percent of groups visiting clusters) to explore how visitor use of clusters varies by use level. Across these metrics, we mostly found no evidence of intra-site displacement as use levels increased. Our results suggest that the relationship between use level and intra-site displacement is nuanced, and other factors such as visitor and site characteristics should be explored in future research. Methodologically, our lack of findings using spatial analyses suggest that findings from self-reported aspatial data collection techniques may overstate the occurrence of intra-site displacement. We discuss implications for managing social and ecological conditions at high use recreation destinations.