Exploring Tourist Preferences on the Visitor Management System: the Case Study of Plitvice Lakes National Park

This study aims to develop an online survey on the tourist perception of the visitor management system of the Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia. As tourists are particularly sensitive to organisational issues related to the Park management, a bottom-up approach based on visitors’ opinions has been applied. First of all, a brief chronology has been reconstructed that retraces the most significant stages of the Park. Subsequently, an online questionnaire was structured on the basis of the current Park Management Plan with a focus on the macro-topics concerning the visitor management system. The survey was distributed using the Google Form application. A total of 214 questionnaires were collected in the period between May and July 2022. The sample was statistically analysed to detect the main habits of the Park users. The Mann-Whitney-Wilcox U test and the Kruskal-Wallis test were applied to identify the differences in the priorities attributed by visitors to the various management actions. Among the main findings of the research, the authors identified that national visitors (i.e. Croatian) place a higher priority on the implementation of services and infrastructure than tourists from other countries. In addition, those who have visited the Park on multiple occasions have higher safety expectations than those who have only visited the Park once. This category of visitors also considers it more important to take into account the opinions of visitors. Furthermore, with regard to retail and souvenir shops, tourists are generally inclined to set a lower priority for intervention than that attributed to other management aspects. The results of this study can be of great value to Park managers, who should consider visitors as key stakeholders in the decision-making process that is the foundation for managing this important natural resource

A Model for the Economic Evaluation of Cultural Ecosystem Services: The Recreational Hunting Function in the Agroforestry Territories of Tuscany (Italy)

Cultural ecosystem services (CESs) are non-material benefits generated by natural and human ecosystems that substantially contribute to human wellbeing. Estimating the monetary value of CESs is challenging because there is no real market for these services and therefore there is no actual market price. This study seeks to define an economic evaluation method for these services, with special reference to a recreational CES that has so far received little discussion: hunting. We conducted an online survey in the province of Siena (Tuscany, Italy). The Consumer Surplus estimate of hunters was made using the travel-cost method with a detailed analysis of the annual expenditure on hunting activities, and a negative binomial statistical regression. The results reflect the nature of hunting activity and show the dynamics that have occurred over recent decades. In fact, whereas hunting used to be strongly connected to the rural world as it was an income supplement for local communities, nowadays it has turned into an elitist and almost exclusively recreational activity. In any case, knowing the economic value of ecosystem services constitutes an essential background for planning effective land management and development policies in the short and long term

Exploring National Park Visitors’ Judgements from Social Media: The Case Study of Plitvice Lakes National Park

This study aims to conduct a survey of visitor reviews of the Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia to detect strengths and weaknesses of the park. In total, 15,673 reviews written in the period between 2007 and 2021 were scraped from the social media platform TripAdvisor. The research applies a comprehensive combination of multidimensional scaling, sentiment analysis, and natural language processing approaches to a sample area of international naturalistic interest. Analyzing the opinions of visitors, the authors identify: the main topics of interest related to the management of the park; and the strengths and weaknesses on the basis of definitely positive and decidedly negative reviews, respectively. The tested methodology is easily applicable for the analysis of different naturalistic contexts and protected areas, even in different countries, thanks to the use of translated reviews. The results obtained show that visitors to protected natural areas are not only interested in naturalistic and landscape aspects but also in issues such as accessibility and management of routes and visits