Nature-based travel motivations for people with disabilities.

Abstract

This paper investigated the travel motives of people with disabilities to national parks. The study was motivated by the fact that people with disabilities (PwDs) are increasingly interested in visiting natural areas today, but park marketers barely understand the reasons for this growing phenomenon and cannot with certainty design the right strategies to attract people with disabilities to their national parks. A quantitative approach was employed to solicit information from 210 persons with disabilities using a computer generated questionnaire. The study was unique in the sense that it was cross-dimensional in nature where people with mobility, visual and hearing impairments were used. Exploratory factor analyses and ANOVAs were performed to analyse the responses and the results revealed that people with disabilities, to a larger extent, have the same motivation for nature-based travel as the able-bodied which includes enjoying nature, spending time with family and escaping the mundane city life. They, however, have other unique motivations which include proving a point and experiencing the healing effect of nature.

Keywords

• Nature-based
• travel motives
• disabilities
• tourism