Social trends and Ecotourism: Adventure Recreation and Amenity Migration

Abstract

Ecotourism is a convenient term for a particular class of human behaviours, real as well as idealised. One critical component of ecotourism research is hence the continual re-examination of what tourists and tourism providers actually do in regard to the defining criteria of ecotourism. And since in practice, people rarely divide their lifestyles into neat packages, social trends outside the ecotourism sector itself maybe as significant as those within it. Whilst the largest-scale megatrends (Buckley, 1998) have not changed significantly over the past decade, there are two medium-scale social trends in developed nations which seem likely to exert strong influences on the development of ecotourism during the next decade.