Ecotourism voluntourism

Jorge Bravo Hervías Strategic Marketing

CASE 1: Concept of protected areas and ecotourism: the challenges for three developing countries.

1. Based on the description of Cambodia’s ICEBV Project, identify and describe the groups of consumers for ecotourism in Cambodia. What motivates ecotourism?
First of all, we should realize what ecotourism is. Ecotourism is the way of tourismthat takes place without disturbing the environmental balance and avoiding damage to nature. This is a trend that seeks to harmonize the tourist industry and ecology. We’ll say that ecotourism could be for anyone but not for everybody; people is fine staying in a hotel, going in some tours, looking around… but for this main reason we’ll say that ecotourism is more focused on people who is concernedand committed with the environment and the area they are going to visit. As we see in the text, at first, ICEBV was going to build two luxury resorts, but they realize that this was going to exceed demand, and if we are talking about ecotourism as don’t damaging the environment, no mass tourism, looking for people environmentally concern, etc, we can see that building two luxury resorts doesn’treally go with the ecotourism idea, so they have built one high-end lodge, and two discount lodges, catering towards the more economically traveler.
What motivates ecotourism is very clear. Ecotourism consist on having the opportunity of getting to know the destination area as willing as possible, this is, getting into a forest which hasn’t been modificated by the human, see the animals in theirreal status, and doing all of this really concern of not doing damage to anything. We have to add to this bag of reasons an important one: with the money you’re paying for going to this place and doing these things, you are helping to maintain it.
Ecotourism is like a wheel: I pay money for doing ecotourism; the money I’ve spent in doing it is use to maintain the environment which is at the sametime the reason for me to do ecotourism.

2. Based on the description of the Wild Animal Rescue’s (WARF) project in Thailand, identify and describe the groups of consumers for voluntourism in Thailand.
Voluntourism has become a “product” that WARF is using to collect money and simultaneously get labor. What consumers get in return depends on the reason for them to pay and go there.
Someconsumers are normal people who feel responsible and the only reason they are looking for is helping, so what they get in return is the satisfaction of helping the animals and the wild life as at the same time, realize or not, some knowledge about the field.
The other group of consumers, as the text says, is formed by students who have almost completed their studies for a degree in biology,ecology, primatology, or veterinary science. Voluntourism offers an opportunity for them to get to conduct research on animal behavior and disease, to be in close contact with the wild animals, and immerse themselves in the animals’ natural habitat.

3. What motivates customers of voluntourism to volunteer and pay to work?
Some people are really concern about the rights for animals to live in theirreal environment. Imagine you are one of these persons and you feel you must help the animals because they are losing their environment because of the humans faults; you can take a plane, go to Thailand, Africa or wherever you want to go, and once you are there, what would you do if there’s nothing organize, and you don’t have any knowledge about the area, how to treat the animals, etc?
Ifanimals are not responsible for the damage of their environment, and everybody knows who is the guilty, it’s predictable that some humans feel responsible for this, even dough it wasn’t exactly their fault; and the thing is: if they have the opportunity to help about this, and if some of them are willing to pay for helping and feel better with themselves, It’s perfectly understandable that a person...