”Is technology an ally to ecotourism or a dangerous enemy? ” We discuss this question and explore the pitfalls and the opportunities of technology for ecotourism. We argue that while technology can standardize the way people value a place and increases feelings of deprivation and frustration, technology can also levels the playing field between diferent geographic locations and increases the diversity and availability of green alternatives. We conclude by presenting examples of applications that support our vision.
With the ecological crisis of the last decades, new forms of consumption appear which redefine
our habits and in particular our way of traveling. Thus, ecotourism has grown rapidly in
the last decades, also correlated to the increase of tourism in general [
© 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). current technologies but also design opportunities. These pitfalls and opportunities are derived from a discussion with a researcher in landscape architecture and urban planning, which we seek to illustrate with existing technological approaches.
Technology can be used to bring people closer to nature, however, there may be pernicious efects to technology. We present two particular points where technology can be detrimental to tourism: i) how technology standardizes the way people value a place or an object; and ii) how technology increases the sense of deprivation and frustration.
As theorized by Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay ”the art of work in the age of its technological
reproduction”, ”the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly,
[...] is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting
its reproduction” [
When applied to tourism and heritage sites (monuments, cities, natural and cultural landscapes...), this statement rings in a unique way: Indeed, places (i.e. realities) that attract the largest influx of tourists are by and large the places whose pictures (i.e. reproductions) are the most widely available. The visitor numbers and the reproduction fueling each other.
To reuse Walter Benjamin’s terminology, the cultic value of a genuine cultural landscape is reinforced by the availability and the fidelity of its pictorial reproductions. The rise of social media has amplified this phenomenon in ways that Walter Benjamin himself could not possibly have anticipated. Since Walter Benjamin wrote these lines in 1936, the intertwined development of technology and culture has never been so true.
Today, the improvement of technology (VR, smartphone, etc) and its access in greater quantity
(Youtube, etc.) push the massification of tourism and the standardization of tourist interests.
While virtual reality can ofer tourism many useful applications [
Technology can also lead to the massification of tourism, which can be detrimental to nature
and ecology. Each site has a carrying capacity [
On the other hand, technology can help change the traditional view of tourism and mentalities. These ofer design opportunities for technological tools, including leveling the playing field between diferent geographic locations.
While some locations are attractive because of the many photos and advertisements online, technology has the ability to level the playing field between diferent geographic locations. In this direction, the German public railway company (Deutsche Bahn) produced an advertising campaign where they used an algorithm to find German lookalike landscape photos of popular touristic sites1 Fig. 2. By increasing the diversity and availability of sources, the Deutsche Bahn ofers cheaper travel destinations that are closer to the users. In doing so, they promote local tourism, give visibility to local tourist sites and support the spread of tourists across diferent locations, thus lightening the pressure on the most visited areas.
Such technology is a great tool to increase the diversity and availability of diferent locations, reducing the feeling of frustration or deprivation while promoting local tourism. This advertising campaign was a great success for Deutsche Bahn and the reason was that Germany has enough cultural heritage to allow such algorithms to work.
As researchers and designers, we need to be mindful of the socio-technical context in which technologies are designed and employed. On one hand, technology can play a role in reinforcing mass tourism and mass capitalism, with its known environmental issues. On the other hand, technology can complement the ecosystem and reinforce good environmental practices. Thus, our aim was not to provide an exhaustive list of pitfalls and opportunities for ecotourism, but rather to question the impact of current technologies and to open up new design possibilities and opportunities.
We argued that technology can increase the sense of deprivation and frustration of users.
Similarly, Guttentag et al. [
We illustrated how technology can level the playing field between diferent tourist locations
and thus, turn current tourists into ecotourists. Technological tools have the power to redirect
the influx of tourists from one place to another. However, how to control this flow of people
remains an open question. One solution is to develop tools for people that act every day for
tourism, land use planning, tourism regulation, and nature preservation. Because they know
the local problems, they should be able to better visualize and control the touristic trafic in their
area. How can we take into account the interests of the diferent stakeholders (local residents,
heritage conservationist, etc.) is an important question, as these interests may be diverse or
even contradictory [
We believe that technology has its place in promoting ecotourism and we propose that technology should not be used to increase the availability and fidelity of copies, which can result in 1https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hnPov9fdcs frustration, standardization of tourist sites, mass tourism, and their associated ecological issues. Instead, we believe it is necessary to increase the diversity and availability of sources and to level the playing field between diferent geographical locations. Thus, it would promote healthier, sustainable, and ecological tourism.
We would like to thank Pierre-Marie Tricaud for his insightful comments, as well as the reviewers of this paper.