Ekoturisten : En studie om kunskap, motiv och vanor gällande ekoturism

Sammanfattning: There are several man-made environmental problems in today’s society. Tourism gives a lot of people serenity, creates jobs and better social circumstances but also has a dark side, a dark side that is harming our environment. Mass tourism creates large amounts of harmful gasses through transportation of tourists, littering ends up in pollution and acidification and the list goes on. Ecotourism has during the latter part of the last decade been marketed as a counter pool to the harmful kind of tourism and offers connectedness to nature. This essay maps knowledge, habits and reasons of ecotourism with consumers above age 18 in Sweden and answers the question if there is a link between people with environmental awareness in their everyday life and ecotourism. Data is collected through a survey. The results show that the knowledge of ecotourism is neither high nor low, the knowledge is at midpoint and higher with ecologists. A lot of people are drawn to the concept itself. There is clear evidence that people who act with environmental awareness are more likely to choose ecotourism than other people. What links these together is ecologism, but also economic anthropocentric reasons as well as wanting to do something different. The most likely person to be an eco-tourist is a female student between the ages of 26-45.