Gerelmaa Gerelsaikhan

Ecotourism - Egotourism? Gerelmaa Gerelsaikhan

The curiosity of the subject was awoken by the examples of ecotourism that could be seen in numerous locations, and which seemed to have no real common denominator except from the ?eco? prefix. The term was apparently used randomly, both by operators selling travels or activities, tourism organisations, and tourists themselves. The ?eco? term seemed to have very different connotations according to the individual actor on the tourism stage, and these different meanings were not always transparent for the consumer of tourism products. We had a strong sense that the tourism industry would benefit from the embedded values in a word such as ?eco?, which the consumers were left to interpret themselves. Most people want to see themselves as environmentally conscious individuals, and it seems obvious to choose products that have an ecofriendly label, at least if the price is the same as conventional products. We wanted to investigate whether it was viable to focus so much on the labeling of activities, rather than the behaviour of the individual.