Visitor management plays an essential role in protecting the ecological sustainability of protected areas, providing funding and business opportunities, and enabling visitors to obtain worthwhile experiences from their visit.
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Visitor management plays an essential role in protecting the ecological sustainability of protected areas, providing funding and business opportunities, and enabling visitors to obtain worthwhile experiences from their visit. Visitor management can be achieved in two main ways:
- by a park agency managing destinations (i.e. parks and their sites) and by directly managing visitors (e.g. through user fees). Or it can be indirectly achieved by
- a park agency working with the tourism industry to both protect the park and offer quality experiences for visitors, as well as generating revenue for the park. This chapter covers both.
For the first point, a range of visitor management strategies can be used including zoning, user pays, managing access and development, campsite planning and management, risk management, and spatial separation and removal of certain activities. Very often the difficulty is knowing, and then choosing which to employ (see Natual Area Tourism).
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