Motives for shelter camping. A survey-study on motivational differences across group composition and experience level

Profiling of Shelter Campers, Their Attitudes, and Perceptions towards Environmental Impacts of Campsite Use and Management: Evidence from National Parks of Sri Lanka

“…A more recent trend in outdoor recreation-"glamping"which combines luxury and nature while respecting the natural environment and providing exclusive and unique nature-based tourism offerings is gaining popularity amongst environmentally conscious tourists [12,18,19]. The growing number of visitors to natural areas who are seeking camping experiences has prompted the nature-based tourism industry and academia to explore their diverse motives, attitudes, behaviors, and factors influencing satisfaction with camping experiences [20,21].…”

“…However, much of the published literature on motivations, behaviors, environmental orientation, and satisfaction of campers are associated with caravanning, camping in recreational vehicles, and, more recently on luxury camping [12,13,16,17,[22][23][24][25][26]. Surprisingly, the rustic shelter camper segment has received scant scholarly attention, and limited studies have attempted to describe their motivations, behaviors, attitudes, and satisfaction [21,27,28].…”

“…Brooker and Joppe [9] further described the demographics and motivations of campers. However, recent studies conducted exclusively on shelter campers [21] suggest that this unique visitor segment needs further research to better understand and inform visitor management at nature-based destinations.…”

“…The majority of published studies on camping as a recreational activity and campers have been carried out in the US, Australia and Europe [9,14,17,49]. The pull factors for camping in the tropics can especially depend on unique destination attributes and are thus different from those that have been reported in the literature from temperate countries [9,14,16,17,21,29,50]. As such, there is a general lack of information on rustic shelter camper characteristics, motivations, on-site behaviors, and perceptions of campsite management in the tropics and Sri Lanka.…”

“…Identifying and describing visitor segments at camping sites, therefore, has important managerial and policy implications. Such studies provide valuable information for park management to tailor their products to different visitor types while allowing policymakers to introduce necessary measures to develop the nature-based tourism sector in a particular location [13,21,40,51]. Brooker and Joppe [9] described three main campsite user segments based on the longevity of the camping: full-time, long-term, and short-term.…”