Transformative travel as a sustainable market niche for protected areas: a new development, marketing and conservation model

Many protected areas worldwide are mandated to provide visitor enjoyment and sustainable heritage conservation but face growing challenges and competition. To satisfy modern aspirational markets, parks must design meaningful experiences delivering long-lasting participant benefits that cultivate vis...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of sustainable tourism 2017-11, Vol.25 (11), p.1650-1673
Main Authors: Wolf, Isabelle D., Ainsworth, Gillian B., Crowley, Jane
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
benefit
Competition
Conservation
Demographics
Environmental conditions
Environmental monitoring
market
Marketing
Markets
nature
Niche markets
park
Parks
Parks & recreation areas
Physical activity
Physiology
Protected areas
Sustainability
Sustainable development
Transformation
Travel
visitor experience
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Summary:Many protected areas worldwide are mandated to provide visitor enjoyment and sustainable heritage conservation but face growing challenges and competition. To satisfy modern aspirational markets, parks must design meaningful experiences delivering long-lasting participant benefits that cultivate visitation rates and a conservation constituency. Transformative travel can deliver such benefits through participants' psycho-physiological transformation but market insights critical for experience development in parks are lacking. Our systematic quantitative review of 126 transformative travel articles provides those insights, linking experiential characteristics, participant traits and motivations to experience outcomes according to five transformative travel typologies pertinent to parks: health and wellness, nature-based physical activity, spiritual, cultural and volunteering travel. We identified 35 travel motivations, 14 participant traits and 23 experience characteristics linked to transformation and 28 purposefully or incidentally realised benefits. Transformative travel improved participants' psychological, physiological, social, economic and environmental conditions, as well as satisfaction with and destination loyalty towards parks. Socio-demographic characteristics and propensity for independent versus social travel shaped choice of travel experience. Our results are uniquely conceptualised in a transformative travel framework and transformative market niche model which we apply to sustainable experience development and marketing in parks. We identify implementation possibilities and areas for future research and monitoring.
ISSN:0966-9582
1747-7646
DOI:10.1080/09669582.2017.1302454