Tourism

zoo trip for tourism thing

 

According to the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (or WAZA) (2005), more than 600 million people visit around 1000 zoos and aquariums around the world annually. This translates to vast visitor traffic, many of whom visit with families for a day out or as part of tourist activity, which in turn generates a lot of revenue in the form of admission fees and merchandise purchase, making zoos a highly popular tourist destination and source of revenue for governments, in the case of government-run zoos.

From here, the lure of zoos as a tourism spot can facilitate public education on conservation issues, and bring about positive change in affective attitudes regarding it. This is reflected in a three-year study done by Falk and his colleagues (2007), where 54% of the 1862 adults surveyed indicated that their perceptions about environmental sustenance and conservation were reevaluated, and they took on a more proactive stance (when before they perceived themselves as unable to help).

However, it may also bring a few challenges to the surface. As is the case with demand and supply, visitors favour certain animals to others, and this can pose problems to zoo organisations in considering which animals place higher priority on as exhibits, and placing less efforts in, or even dismissing, other species which are not as popular. This might mean that if the species that is threatened and require more effort to conserve is popular, more resources will be shelled out as finance-driven zoos will do so willingly if they can reap monetary benefits in the process. However, lesser species might suffer from this and might be deprived the help they need more for restoration of their numbers.

All in all, though, while the role of zoos as a tourist attraction is still prevalent today, it is slowly dwindling, with increasingly bigger roles as an education facilitator for issues on conservation and environmental protection. Such has been the shift in focus since the 1960s, due to the increasingly pressing need for species protection (Ballantyne, Packer, Hughes, & Dierking, 2007).

A general assessment of the zoo and its various roles, as well as how well it fulfils these roles