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

Tourism is destructive toward host communities and their natural environment. However, the general attitude of society toward the environment is hanging, 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 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 article reveals the varying degrees of empowerment of host communities provided by community-based ecotourism through a metastudy 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.