Eco-tourism Consumer Behavior Research

Tourism is the world's largest industry. It accounts for more than 10% of total employment, 11% of global GDP, and total tourist trips are predicted to increase to 1.6 billion by 2020. At the same time, it has a major and increasing impact on both people and nature such as waste and pollution generation and landscapes degradation. In contrast, responsible as well as green tourism can help to generate awareness of and support for conservation and local culture. The increasing environment awareness in society caused an "eco-boom" in tourism and the term "ecotourism" became a popular way for promoting destinations. This paper aims to put forward the model of ecotourist behavior to give some guidelines to ecotourism management according to the analysis of influential factors and characteristic of ecotourist behavior.This dissertation will focus on the topic of Ecotourist behavior and will be divided into 5 sections. Still there is no officially recognized and standardized definition of ecotourism. Although the definition varies considerably between countries, this paper tries to find something similar based on variable concepts related to ecotourism.To understand ecotourist behavior, the meaning of the term "ecotourist" must first be clarified firstly. This paper presents a general overview of relatively recent tourist behavior research and issues relevant to ecotourist behavior from economic, social and psychological perspective, including internal and international research. It discusses the concepts of ecotourist as well and provides differences between ecotourist behavior and general travelers. Environmental, psychological as well as population factors play a dominant part in cultivating such differences.Sampling investigation is one of the main means to illustrate ecotourist behavior. Therefore questionnaires are applied and it is of value to analyze the results through TRA theory: the relation between ecotourist attitude, subjective norm and ecotourist behavior are positive. It is time to put forward "ecotourist behavior model" in base of previous existing literature.Last but not least, the intent is to provide potential and effective measures and highlight some practical considerations to serve as a primer for future ecotourism management.