Determinantes no Processo de Decisão de Compra do Consumidor em Contextos de Ecoturismo

• Autor(a) principal: Roseta, Paulo Jorge Fontainhas
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/11110/1525
• topic: Ecoturismo; imagem destino; lealdade; sustentabilidade; perfil do ecoturista

Tourism has an important role in Portuguese economy due to the country’s own worldwide potential. With the natural evolution of tourism sustainable tourism was originated in whose concept ecotourism emerges. This is a type of tourism with a growing importance and one of the fastest growths among the new types of tourism. Ecotourism is based on the fundamental principles of sustainable tourism. It is a sustainable development tool which promotes long-term social, environmental and economic benefits. This type of tourism also allows the development of certain regions as, for example, the ones suffering from desertification, which would not develop otherwise, emphasising as always, the preservation of nature and cultural traditions of the local population and its interaction with the project and promoting environmental education. The relevance of natural heritage in Portugal is reinforced by the classification of Natural World Heritage sites by UNESCO. Thus, the present exploratory research has as main goal to understand the determiners in the process of the consumer decision in ecotourism contexts, as well as to verify the growing importance of ecotourism. The results show an evident growth in this segment, based on the conduction of 197 surveys in the form of questionnaire (online). The attained data lead to the conclusion that the destination image plays a fundamental part in terms of experience and the tourist’s own satisfaction, having the need to improve the degree of affectivity towards the hotel unit, as a consequence of the destination image and that has influence on satisfaction. In this analysis, a proposed conceptual model was tested and the correlation among the variables of the same model was evaluated, in order to establish causal relationships among independent variables (e.g. involvement) and the behavioural intentions of ecotourism consumers in specific contexts. Natural heritage is vital for tourism, as it is for ecotourism, being as such necessary to protect this asset which is fundamental for this type of tourism. Focus is also placed on the necessity of having more legislation for ecotourism and fostering of support funds for the creation of projects within this field.