Tourism Students’ Knowledge and Tenets Towards Ecotourism

Abstract

During the last decades, youth and student travellers aged 15 to 30 have become an important part of the international tourism market. However, global ecotourism trends found that ecotourists are mainly middle-aged to elderly. Based on this, the present research is aimed at investigating, on the basis of ecotourism key tenets detected from a number of studies aimed at analyzing contemporary ecotourism definitions, the knowledge of issues, attitudes and intentions towards ecotourism among a sample of young people. The total sample was drawn from university students from different countries, totalling 613 respondents. The research revealed that for the majority of respondents surveyed their knowledge of ecotourism remains scarce, although some differences were found by country of residence. It is therefore important to develop ecotourism courses where the core differences among ecotourism, nature-based tourism and mass tourism are emphasized to a greater extent. Finally, one cannot expect students to understand a certain study field if they have not had any practical experience: ecotourism events and workshops beside fieldtrips should then be promoted.

Keywords:

• ecotourism
• tourism students
• socio-psychological factors
• education

The authors want to acknowledge the following people and institutions: all the students for completing the questionnaires and the five universities that took part in the research, namely Germany (Fachhochschule Westküste), Italy (University of Padua), South Africa (North-West University), Mexico (Universidad Anáhuac) and the USA (George Mason University); lastly, the reviewers for their valuable comments.