In today’s fast-paced world, people are looking to travel to satisfy a broad range of desires: to learn, to relax, and to experience excitement in exhilarating outdoor settings such as high peaks or raging rivers. Generally speaking, adventure tourism is a blend of the excitement of adventure with a revitalizing experience in nature. The shift from a consumer culture to an experience culture and a concern for psychological, physical, and spiritual well-being not only represent an epistemological revolution but, increasingly, also a tangible change in lifestyle. The adventure market already represents a significant portion of the international tourism market, and many observers expect that it will continue to increase in importance on the basis of three categories of motivations.
- A return to nature;
- The quest for an inner quest;
- The perception of adventure as a social development tool for an individual.
Defining Adventure Tourism and Sustainability
The growing popularity of adventure experiences among tourists, brought about by global trends towards experientialism, individualism, and the pursuit of hedonistic experiences, has translated into significant tourism dollars for providers of natural and nature-based settings around the world. However, the success of this venture at several of the often iconic ‘meccas’ of adventure has, in some instances, led to overcrowding and degradation of the very attributes that have so enticed tourists. The result has been a degradation of the very attributes that provide the uniqueness of these ‘adventure’ attractions. This chapter explores the concept of ‘sustainability’ in terms of adventure tourism through a rural and regional development lens.
Adventure tourism has been one of the fastest-growing sectors of the global tourism market. While there is an expectation that adventure experiences will provide personal challenge and growth through overcoming the risks exclusively associated with natural settings, the perceived possibility of conquering another of the planet’s natural features/views/physical obstacles often rests on artificial supports provided by humans or their machinations. Like other forms of tourism, adventure tourism is inextricably associated with access to place. However, unlike many other forms of tourism, adventure experiences are sought, at least in part, because of their perceived challenge, unpredictability, risk, and inaccessibility. Adventure travelers do not perceive themselves as simple spectators; rather, they believe that they themselves have gained from participating in the landscape in a quite intimate manner.
The Impact of Adventure Tourism on the Environment
Any thriving industry that substantially utilizes the environment can hardly remain isolated from its impacts. Adventure tourism is largely based in often pristine environments that form the appeal of this type of tourism. In the process of taking visitors to these areas, adventure tourism contributes to the degradation of these diverse natural attractions. Given the generally accepted concerns over the sustainability of the adventure tourism industry, this is indeed a dangerous conundrum. The very existence of the adventure tourism product depends upon the critical interplay of its environmental and cultural resources. Ultimately, adventure tourism may suffer the fate of its predecessors ancillary to the depletion of uniqueness and, paradoxically, excess in popularity. It is vital from a strategic perspective that adventure tourism reaps the benefits of discussing and taking measures to alleviate or, at the very least, minimize its negative impacts now.
The basic appeal of this form of tourism lies in experiencing a new place and activity. These are often the same reasons that different groups of people, such as indigenous peoples and scientists, are attracted to travel to these remote locations as there is potential for discovery. Ecotourism generally targets the pursuit of conserving the physical environment and a locality. The key to sustainable tourism, therefore, calls for conservation strategies in addition to just minimizing impact. This involves reducing the overall size of the environmental footprint. Not only does the environmental impact need to remain as low as possible but the area’s integrity also needs protection. The focus of the industry needs to move to direct active participation in conserving the unique qualities that form the cornerstone of this tourism experience for future generations.
Information must be factually correct. Preconceived values must not interfere with the selection and distribution of information on both the costs and potential benefits of reducing impact or managing the long-term consequences. With clear guidelines and ongoing education, those working with the adventure tourist industry can be successful in preventing impact and managing the quality of the product. Just as ecotourism can generate wealth to safeguard the natural environment, so too can adventure tourism assist special places to move away from dependence on more destructive land uses.
Positive Impacts of Adventure Tourism
Many studies have highlighted the potential positive impacts that adventure tourism can have, especially economically and socially. Local people providing experience-based tourism services can see improvements in their incomes, job satisfaction, and skills. Additionally, communities can experience enhanced social services and enterprise growth. Adventure tourists can also create a commodity value for a given natural area, generating support for conservation, particularly if they gain an emotional connection to the area or sympathy for the people living in proximity to it. Otherwise, bleak predictions of natural resources overuse in high-demand recreation areas seem to mostly be dated, sensationalistic, and not considering the resilience of nature and society’s capacity to address overuse.
The sum of human experience visiting the world’s iconic natural sites at the hands of the mass tourism market, at what price the experience? However, the existing and potential landscape of negative outcomes from adventure tourism should not be ignored. Wildlife is often negatively impacted, such as burrowing owls by rock climbers’ noise. Whether it is activity center growth or encouraged use of existing resources, clashes between threatened or endangered species and humans visiting adventure travel destinations, freshwater destinations such as sea kayaking in Florida, steelhead fishing in Deschutes, and rafting in the Teton River are examples of conflict. Additionally, tourists and tour operators can encourage the enhancement of natural features, making them more robust, and modern technology could also contribute to abrogating the negative impacts and enhancing the positive ones via realistic experience simulation.
Strategies for Balancing Thrills and Conservation
Adventure tourism occurs within diverse destinations and geographies, covering a wide variety of outdoor activities and attractions, and engaging with broad communities of participants and stakeholders. This constituency possesses diverse and varied interests; not least of which, the desire for a thrill provided through involvement in an exciting and risk-enhanced experience. Integral to the design and delivery of successful adventure tourism services are the opportunities they present for visitors to be dynamically engaged with the world; regardless of their type, nature, and duration. But, despite the broad-based appeal and wide range of opportunities presented within adventure tourism, the management and development of adventure tourism is challenging.
Indeed, realizing ambitions for adventure tourism to be economically, environmentally, and socially beneficial is often undermined by the ‘mechanization’ of adventure experiences and the failure of operators to develop significant community relationships and connections. Adventure tourism has frequently been accused of being more concerned with entrepreneurship than the provision of an experience and failing to deliver a real experience of place. Signs indicating the risks associated with overcrowded locations and the presence of interpretation do little to enhance the experience of place sought by many visitors, which is predominantly derived through exposure to the natural environment. At the same time, for those with pre-existing specialist interest in participating episodes have the potential to become ‘monotony, punctuated by moments of high excitement’. The behavior of some small groups and individuals often causes cumulative and increasing damage to wildlife and ecosystems.
Community Involvement and Benefits
Tourism development that supports mountain communities is not a new idea. What is interesting about the focus groups is that they were clear about how this can best be realized, and were also crystal clear about how it can all go wrong. It seemed that the participants were appreciative of the help to market their activities and the opportunities that mountain visitors bring to their communities through language teaching, money for food, clothing, and hardware, and money in the bank when they deposited the proceeds of their activities there also. However, it was also quickly highlighted that the old problem of a lack of understanding of the communities’ abilities and the tourist market can present difficulties. This situation would have an additional dimension in terms of causing a reduction in other economic opportunities that were currently possible. In the case of some fieldwork situations in Bhutan, homestays in the less-visited nearby villages were seen as one of the benefits of the 3 days of shelter, food, and company that trekkers had in the region. While the more visited villages had nice homestays, those that were more remote with fewer trekker nights relied more upon other forms of livelihood to survive.
Conclusion and Future Directions
Adventure travel is the fastest growing segment of the tourism industry and is expanding from hard to soft adventure activities. This increasing demand for adventure experiences sets the stage for negative impacts on all areas of the adventure experience, including social and cultural impacts, economic impacts, and environmental impacts. The intent of this conceptual paper is to further explore sustainable adventure tourism. This paper was grounded in literature on adventure tourism and sustainable tourism. As the two concepts have not been defined and operationalized, the paper begins with definitions of both adventure tourism and sustainable tourism. Next, sustainable adventure tourism is defined and measured based on various constructs in the literature on adventure tourism, acknowledging that adventure tourism is an encapsulating form of tourism. Suggestions are made to measure the sustainability of adventure experiences based on the common elements of adventure in the literature. Finally, implications for academia and industry are discussed.
With over 2.5 million adventure tourists visiting the Rocky Mountains and desert Southwest of the US, the importance of this paper is to address the demand for adventure travel based on the foundational elements of extremes, risks, novelty, flexibility of through thinking, and total physical, social, spiritual, and psychological involvement together with education and interest for the tourists along with evolutionary learning, stewardship, quality of life, and conservation of those who provide the adventure experiences. This paper suggests measuring the sustainability of an adventure experience (or tour) based on the common elements of adventure. These elements are extremes and risk, novelty, flexibility and through thinking, education and learning experiences, and conservation of adventure experiences. These public goods or services are not provided by the priority users or beneficiaries, but there is a high demand to provide them.