ONLINE STUDY ADVENTURE TOURISM
Expand your knowledge and ability to manage and plan adventure tourism services.
This exciting course covers the scope and nature of adventure tourism in today's market and looks at the sources and types of opportunities available within this fast growing industry. Other topics include: outdoor adventure and management training, the customer, artificial environments, supply, geography, sustainability, and environmental impacts. This course develops a capacity to plan and manage the provision of adventure tourism services.
Lesson Structure
There are 8 lessons in this course:
-
Scope and nature of Adventure tourism
-
The Product: Sources and Types
-
Management
-
The Customer
-
Locations & Facilities - Artificial environments
-
Locations & Facilities - Natural
-
Ethics, Sustainability and Environmental impacts
-
Risk management & Insurance
Each lesson culminates in an assignment which is submitted to the school, marked by the school's tutors and returned to you with any relevant suggestions, comments, and if necessary, extra reading.
Aims
-
Define the nature and scope of adventure tourism
-
Identify types of adventure tours, and sources of information on them.
-
Consider the requirements of managing an adventure tourism destination or service.
-
Identify potential customers, customer needs and requirements in planning and conducting adventure tours.
-
Identify various kinds of artificial environments for adventure tours, and the facilities typically provided at them.
-
Discuss the requirements and problems associated with using natural locations for adventure tours.
-
Identify ethical and environmental issues related to adventure tourism.
-
Identify kinds of risk and strategies for reducing their negative impacts on customers and operators.
The stimulation and intensity associated with adventure contributes to removing the experience from the routine of everyday life. Exotic surrounding, new activities, experiences beyond anything one has ever experienced contributes to a sense of escapism. Adventure is a chance to escape the everyday concerns of life. Imagine being on top of Mt Everest. Would you be thinking of anything else but just being there? Enjoying the rapture of having achieved such a feat, the wondrous view and the elation of breaking your boundaries? No wonder adventure is so popular.
The term ‘Adventure tourism’ can represent many kinds of experience, and an almost infinite range of tourism situations. What they all share is participant’s sense of excitement and adventure, and of entering an experience or series of experiences that will take them out of urban areas into more natural and less obviously regulated environments.
Motivating factors for adventure tourism
People are motivated to undertake adventure tourism activities for different reasons. Some may enjoy the anticipation of an unknown or uncertain outcome. This could be undertaking something new and unfamiliar or the presence of a perceived danger in the activity. This element of risk involved in an activity might be relished by some and feared by others.
There needs to be a degree of challenge in an activity for it to be considered adventurous. A challenging event might have an element of danger, unknown outcomes and degree of difficulty. This will attract different participants to the activity based on their expectations and willingness to cope with challengers.
There also needs to be a perceived reward on completion of the activity. This is usually the sense of meeting a challenge and pushing themselves beyond their usual comfort zone. This is referred to as an intrinsic reward, as it comes from within. There may also be extrinsic awards such as a trophy. An example, would be gaining a place in a white-water kayaking race.
A sense of escapism is also important for an activity to be considered adventurous. This is why most adventure tourism operations occur in natural areas. In this way people can feel that they are really escaping from their normal lives. A person might experience heightened senses, an adrenalin rush or a sense of calm following the experience. Again, it is important to remember that adventure can mean different things to different people. Sailing a boat around the Greek Islands may seem adventurous to some but not to others.
Adventure Activities
Activities associated with adventure can be categorized into the following:
- Physical – eg. hiking, mountain-biking and hang gliding
- Nature-based – eg. bushwalking, birdwatching
- Cultural – eg. pilgrimages
- Travel/Exploration – eg. long-distance sailing, Silk Road treks.
These activities form niche markets within the tourism industry based on the activity undertaken and their setting. They can vary in their “adventure” rating. Guided garden tours would be considered not to be very adventurous, whereas camping in the Andes would be considered extremely adventurous.
Nature-based tourism can fall into both categories of “ecotourism” and “adventure tourism”.
