Understanding the spectrum of soft and hard ecotourists

Despite the traditional assumption that ecotourists are homogenous, recent theoretical and empirical studies have shown that the ecotourism market is heterogeneous. While methodology and terminology used to segment the ecotourism market differs from study to study, most studies contain elements of a soft and hard spectrum of ecotourists. The spectrum of soft and hard ecotourism originally developed by Weaver and Lawton (2001) identifies 10 behaviour based characteristics of ecotourists. The model was developed through behaviour based market segmentation, which differs from other empirical studies of ecotourism market segmentation, which tend to focus on motivations and values. This paper argues that there is a research opportunity in integrating values and motivational factors into the behaviour based model to develop a deeper understanding of ecotourism market segments.