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Over the last two decades in development management and eco-destination positioning on tourism market much attention has been devoted to the complexity of the tourist products mainly referring to environmentally responsible travel, supporting the preservation of authentic material and spiritual cultural values that have a beneficial and active impact on local population. In search for such touristic products, new concepts and models have been developed in order to guarantee the quality of experiencing nature and to protect the natural and cultural basis for future businesses and generations of visitors. The increase in number of tourists in such touristic flows conditions careful and well planned management of the sustainable development and positioning of the eco-touristic destination as a system within STEEP framework. Therefore the objective of this paper is to stress the importance, limitations and future of eco-destinations as tourist destinations, touristic product, as well as a specific offer involving a set of resources, activities and actors on a specific territory and the territory belonging to the local community.
Keywords: ecotourism, destination, environment, tourist positioning, sustainable development
INTRODUCTION
Modern way of living unfortunately increases negligence towards nature and people respectively. We live in the modern age where even the farthest and the most sensitive parts of our planet can be easily reached. Namely, former fear of wild, unknown and unpredictable nature has been suppressed by the new knowledge, i.e. scientific explanations of the natural phenomena. Technological development has enabled people to tame nature. In order to prevent negative influence that is brought about by the mass tourism in the process of searching for the new touristic product, both tourists and the creators of the touristic offers are making great efforts to restore the importance of nature as a tourist attraction. Original, clean and untouched nature is again recognized as the new attraction on the tourism market and the new business opportunity. The need to replace traditional tourism model predominant on the mass market culminated in the 1980s by introducing the concept of the alternative tourism, which was again initiated by the requests from the tourists that craved to visit the new destination, i.e. the untouched nature. Unfortunately those alternative tourists eventually became the pioneers of the new type of the mass tourism because their...