Visitors’ motivations to engage in glacier tourism in the European Alps: comparison of six sites in France, Switzerland, and Austria

Abstract

Glacier tourism is an important form of travel in the Alps that is currently threatened by climate change. Previous studies have shown that glaciers are retreating worldwide, and media coverage has led to the development of last-chance tourism. However, few studies have focused on the European Alps, and glacier site visitors have not been segmented based on their motivations yet, hindering the understanding of different profiles. Therefore, using a latent class analysis, this study reveals that the 1330 survey respondents from six glacier tourism sites (Montenvers, Nid d’Aigle, Glacier Blanc, Rhône Glacier, Aletsch Glacier, and Franz–Josefs–Höhe/Pasterze) in three alpine countries (France, Switzerland, and Austria) can be segmented into four classes based on their motivations and other factors. Among them, the “last chance” and “climate visitor” classes were identified, representing between 50% and 57% of the respondents from the investigated sites. The results also indicate that visitors’ motivations are stable across sites and that glaciers are the object of last-chance tourism. This research contributes to the fields of glacier tourism and last-chance tourism by proposing a segmentation of visitors and allowing the generalisation of the presence of last-chance tourism for glacier tourism sites in the Alps.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• last-chance tourism
• glacier tourism
• motivation
• latent class analysis
• Alps

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the personnel of the sites studied for the access allowed. Finally, we gratefully thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editor for their constructive comments that help us to improve our manuscript considerably.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Labex ITEM: [Grant Number ANR 10-LABX-0050]; ALCOTRA n342 AdaPT Mont Blanc project: [Grant Number Interreg V-A Italy-France 2014–2020 program].

Notes on contributors

Emmanuel Salim

Dr Emmanuel Salim* is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography and Sustainability of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He defended his PhD from the University Savoie-Mont-Blanc, France, in 2021 about the impacts of climate change on Alpine glacier tourism. Since 2022, his work aims to link human and physical geography by studying the impacts of climate change on tourism, including landscape perception, tourism experience, visitor behaviour and motivation. [email protected]

Marius Mayer

Dr Marius Mayer is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Strategic Management, Marketing and Tourism (Team SME and tourism), University of Innsbruck, Austria. He worked as junior professor for economic geography and tourism at University of Greifswald, Germany from 2013 to 2020 and has a PhD in geography from Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Germany. His research interests cover the nexus between tourism, climate change, destination and regional development as well as sustainable tourism and the economics of protected areas. [email protected]

Philipp Sacher

Dr Philipp Sacher is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Human Geography, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany. He has a PhD from Greifswald University, Germany, where he worked from 2015 to 2020 as scientific assistant. His research interests include human-nature-relationships, cultural ecosystem services, primarily of forests, as well as urban geography, with a spatial focus on Central Europe. [email protected]

Ludovic Ravanel

Dr Ludovic Ravanel is a CNRS researcher in Geography at the University Savoie-Mont-Blanc. His work concerns the evolution of high mountain environments, notably permafrost-affected rock faces, ice faces, glaciers, and related natural hazards, in the context of climate change. *corresponding author