Community-based ecotourism to meet the new tourist's expectations: an exploratory study

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HAL Id: hal-00951031
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00951031
Submitted on 24 Mar 2014
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Community-based ecotourism to meet the new tourist’s
expectations: an exploratory study
Amélie Fiorello, Damien Bo
To cite this version:
Amélie Fiorello, Damien Bo. Community-based ecotourism to meet the new tourist’s expectations:
an exploratory study. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 2012, 21 (7), pp.758-778.
�10.1080/19368623.2012.624293�. �hal-00951031�

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Community-Based Ecotourism to Meet the New Tourist's 
Expectations: An Exploratory Study 
Amélie Fiorello 
Damien Bo 

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1 
A
BSTRACT
 
Tourism is destructive toward host communities and their natural environment. However, the 
general attitude of society toward the environment is changing and consequently, people are 
developing an appreciation for the value of responsible travel. Alternative forms of tourism have 
been conceived, such as ecotourism, and are viewed as a mean to meet the expectations of the 
new tourists
. Ecotourism is a method to satisfy the concern of new tourists for environmental 
conservation but it neglects one of the key factors of sustainable tourism today: the host 
communities. Community-Based Ecotourism (CBET) aims at environmental conservation but it 
is also a way to empower communities, by allowing them a degree of control over tourism 
projects and their impacts. This paper reveals the varying degrees of empowerment of host 
communities provided by community-based ecotourism through a meta-study analysis of six case 
studies of tourism projects. Not all contemporary tourism projects take local populations into 
consideration thus the six case studies are nonrandom selections for the purpose of representing 
the concept embodied in the thesis and showing its appropriateness with the new tourists’ 
expectations.