Ecotourists: Identification And Pro-environmental Behavior Characteristics

With the development of tourism, the negative impact of bad behavior in tourist activityon ecological environment is increasing day by day, people gradually realize tourist activitywill have an impact on environment, and if without proper adjustment and management, thisimpact will lead to a reversible disaster. Ecological tourism is a sustainable tourism. In therecent30years, scale of ecological tourism expands gradually, bringing rich economicinterests to many nations and districts. The development, objective and mission’saccomplishment of ecological tourism largely depend on the object of ecological touristactivity, namely ecological tourist, which has an intimate relationship with tourism’s activity.Therefore, to exactly identify ecotourists and throughly understand their behavior featureswill help us to deeply understand ecological tourism market. Research on ecotourist’sbehavior features help foster the ecological tourism market and promote the healthydevelopment of ecological tourism.Based on the investigation of Hainan Yanoda tropical rain forest ecotourism area, thispaper takes tourism as the research object, sets up ecological tourist screening criteria withreading a lot of literature at home and abroad, recognizes ecotourists according to standards,and then analyzes the differences of environmental behaviors between ecotourist and othertourist, the results are as follows:(1) This paper puts forward the factors screening ecotourist in theory based on thebehavior of tourists according to the connotation of ecological tourism, namely naturalexperience motivation, learning motivation and environmental attitudes. In accordance withthe problem that the concepts of current ecological tourism and ecotourist are generalization,this paper puts forward the classified indications widely accepted and taken as the corestandards of eco-tourism and the theoretical basis by academic circles. Empirical studies showthat the tourists clustering based on the indicators of "tourist motives+environmentalattitudes" is one of the effective methods to identify ecotourists.(2) The visitors in the ecological tourist area are not always the real Ecotourists, the realEcotourists are just a few part. Only17.4%of visitors are Ecotourists, and another43.7%ofvisitors are accidental type Ecotourists, the mass tourists are accounted for38.9%.(3) Ecotourists are mainly young people with higher education degree, middle-levelincome, and women are slightly more than men among ecotourists.(4) Compared with the mass tourists, ecotourists have a higher support for protectingscenic area and maintaining the natural ecological system measures, they have a higher level of implementation intention of friendly behaviors to the environment, and they have astronger intention to pay an additional fee to the scenic area to protect the environment.(5) Different types of tourists have different related factors of intention level ofpro-environmental behavior: Ecotourists’ intention level of pro-environmental behavior has asignificant positive relationship with environment effectiveness sense, environment actionknowledge levels, and consequences sense, it means that the ecotourists’ environmentself-efficacy are stronger, the environmental knowledge level is higher, and the consequencessense is stronger, its intention level of pro-environmental behavior is higher. Mass tourists’intention level of pro-environmental behavior has a significant positive relationship withenvironmental sensitivity, environment self-efficacy, consequences sense, subjective norms,and environmental action knowledge. Accidental type Ecotourists’ intention level ofpro-environmental behavior is related to environment self-efficacy and environmentsensitivity. This indicates that environmental self-efficacy is the factor associated with alltourists’ pro-environmental behavior. Strengthening environmental self-efficacy andemphasizing on "you can, you can contribute to environmental protection" are the effectiveways. Different types of tourists have different factors affecting pro-environmental behavior,so we should apply different methods of environmental education and management measures.(6) Based on the above research results, this paper put forward some countermeasuresand suggestions to establish the appropriate management measures, scientific and reasonableenvironmental education system promoting all kinds of tourists’ friendly behavior toenvironment.