Abstract

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the key principles and challenges involved in tourism marketing in a national park context. It provides a framework to apply marketing principles to inform practices and guide the sustainable management of national parks and protected areas. The main themes address the foundation principles of marketing and contextualise these principles around a series of key insights and challenges related to the delivery of sustainable tourism services in national parks. The book centres on the issues faced by park managers as they address the need to manage national parks sustainably for future generations. It will be of interest to natural resource and tourism students, tourism scholars and natural resource managers as well as researchers in the areas of geography and forestry.

Stephen L. Wearing is Associate Professor at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia and has worked in the field for 25 years. His research interests include ecotourism, community based and volunteer tourism, environmentalism, the sociology of leisure and tourism and social sciences in protected area management.

Stephen Schweinsberg is Lecturer in Sustainable Management at the University of Technology Sydney Business School, Australia and his research focuses on tourism and rural community interactions and national park based tourism management.

John Tower is Senior Lecturer in Recreation and Sport Management at Victoria University, Australia. He has worked in the leisure, recreation and sport industry for over 30 years with a particular interest in community sport and recreation participation and the delivery of community sport and recreation services.

I have enjoyed this book. It provides a useful compilation of the relevant literatures, augmented by informed commentary and often insightful suggestions.

This book proposes a new approach to the marketing of National Parks, using concepts such as sustainable marketing, power relationships, cultural legitimacy, and demarketing. The book challenges readers and managers to think anew about visitor, community and park relationships. It provides a unique thrust for future park visitor management.

The book is extremely well-written, extensively referenced in terms of both theory and practice, and provocative. The case studies present interesting examples of attempts at successful marketing sustainable tourism in a variety of national parks and highlight some of the real-world shortcomings and pitfalls of a relatively novel and innovative approach to reconciling the seemingly oppositional forces involved in attempting to bring together the goals of both national parks and tourism.

For those interested in marketing – making connections between people and their parks – this book dives deeper, uncovering philosophy, circumstance and practice in informative and often provocative ways thus challenging readers to think out of the box to design an effective marketing perspective and practice.