Sustainable visitor experience design in nature-based tourism: an introduction to the Special Issue

Experiences are at the heart of nature-based tourism – without good experiences, demand dwindles, and as a result, the nature-based tourism industry suffers. However, the nature-based tourism community does not dictate visitor experiences, as these are constructed in visitors’ minds, but instead sets up and arranges the conditions for visitors to do so. Thus, the current Special Issue was designed to bring to the forefront of nature-based tourism research the challenges of designing sustainable nature-based tourism experience opportunities.

Natural and cultural heritage is at the heart of the nature-based tourism experience, and that is where these experience opportunities begin; but, as the research in this volume shows, quality experiences are often dependent on more than that heritage. As we noted in our original call for papers, nature-based tourism stands at the intersection of tourism, outdoor recreational activities and natural areas. Because of its importance to economies and the natural environment, we need a better understanding of its sustainability, what it entails, and how quality experience opportunities can be designed and implemented. To do this, we need enhanced measurement tools and methodologies, as well as an understanding of the relationships between experience quality and conservation goals, the transmission of benefits to communities, and knowledge about natural features and processes. Understanding the implications for operating revenue and the providers’ perspective on nature-based tourism vis-à-vis other potential uses of nature-dominated areas is also critical. Indeed, the knowledge gap is enormous; but our understanding of relationships is still relatively small.

Mandić and McCool (2022) deliver the inventory and assessment of the last fifteen years of the experience-design research and suggest ten significant lessons learned from research over this period. This paper provides an overall context for the following cases, illustrating the various dimensions nature-based tourism takes when understanding what is involved in delivering innovative opportunities for nature-based tourism experiences and assessing their success. Identifying an experience's components is essential to designing opportunities. For example, Spring (2022) provides creative looks into the motivations and dimensions of nature-based visitor experiences. Further, understanding if experience opportunities are satisfying is also essential to managing such experience opportunities adaptively. For example, Sivakami et al. (2022) reported on developing an impact management model in Eravikulam National Park in India to tackle the factors affecting overall experiences negatively. Loyalty has become one method of measuring satisfaction. Relying on unique contexts, two papers, including Mock et al. (2022) and Dybsand et al. (2021), provide insights into this methodology and explain the contextual dependence of the concept.

Various design considerations come into play during the visitor design, implementation and evaluation process. Nature-based visitor experiences result in outcomes not just for the visitor but also for the resource and social systems. Lengieza et al. (2022) argue that participation in nature-based tourism leads to specific psychological outcomes, leading to a greater appreciation of the natural and social systems involved in the experience and, eventually, sustainability. Similarly, Akhoundogli and Buckley (2021) claim that nature tourists gain psychological restoration through calm and tranquil nature contemplation while adventure tourists gain psychological recharge through challenge and achievement.

Visitors’ active engagement in the process of experience design is critical. Adie et al. (2022) used visitors to a large underwater lake cave in Iran to examine the importance of co-creation, indicating that experience design involves multiple actors, each with a different role, often in different stages of the process. The absence of an actor may negatively affect visit quality. Those actors involve, for example, tour operators or hiking guides, as studied by Palli et al. (2022) in Italy. According to them, hiking guides, for example, are essential sources of knowledge for the visitors but also raiee tourist awareness of sustainability, explaining biodiversity conservation strategies and reducing ecotourism's ecological footprint. Innovative methodologies were also reported in several studies. Nowacki and Kowalczyk-Anioł (2022) used TripAdvisor online reviews to examine the association between visitor perceptions of sustainability and nature experienced in several Baltic Islands, while Branstrator et al. (2022) relied on critical theory and virtual reality to create a visitor experience centred around the ecology and management of grey wolves in Colorado, USA.

This Special Issue points to the diversity of research, settings, and stakeholders necessary to produce quality nature-based tourism experience opportunities. We notice how research on the topic has increased in volume, expanded topics and innovative thinking, both in research questions and methodology. Our questions driving research are beginning to reach the far reaches of our minds becoming more cognizant of the impact of larger-scale systems and events on smaller-scale communities and providers. In this sense, we are beginning to formulate questions that recognize the importance of systems thinking in linking causes and effects. Further, the studies included in this Special Issue demonstrate that nature-based tourism research is diversifying the field's subject matter, and thus this shows how different approaches reinforce the whole, the arena we call nature-based tourism research. This diversifying research shows how nature-based tourism opportunities are constructed of multiple disciplines but must be put together in such a way as to result in a new kind of opportunity. We now have a better understanding of how research, taken as a whole, benefits the practice of design and development, resulting in more successful businesses, and possibly ones that are resilient to the perturbations, both man and natural, that the field is continually challenged by. Ultimately, research enhances understanding and perhaps even wisdom about how particular systems work. With this increased understanding, more beneficial and relevant experiences can be offered. Thus, we will ultimately see businesses, protected area managers, communities and the various service providers being more efficient and more resilient to perturbations that occur in any adapting social-ecological system. Finally, we see that the field of experience design benefits from strong and more intimate relationships between research and practice. Innovation comes from both and is a function more of how that occurs than attempts to make distinctions between the two. In a sense, applied nature-based tourism research becomes an extension of practice, sometimes very indirect and sometimes more direct. This lets us better describe and understand the industry's challenges and problems while providers come to a better understanding of how researchers operate and the challenges they face.

Nature-based tourism experiences centre on nature-dominated environments. We have learned a lot about visitors and their visits, and we should not forget that the numbers around which we focus our discussion, those visitors have developed a passion for those environments—and the heritage they encounter during the visit—which is not necessarily represented in the statistics used in empirical research. How we bring passion into our discussions remains an important question and should not be neglected. Thus, we do hope the readers find the papers in this Special Issue informative, useful and enjoyable. We hope that the papers stimulate additional creative thinking and research and that in the future, at some point, there will be another Special Issue reviewing and synthesizing new work on experience design in a nature-based tourism context.