Do you know what “Ecotourism” is? Well, if you don’t (even if you do know), this is a place, where you could find out more about ecotourism, a project that I was involved in for seven weeks.
Ecotourism comes from two different words, ecology and tourism. Ecology is part of biology, but in this case, it means living organisms or things related to nature or the environment. Tourism is the act of going on holidays or visiting fun places. Overall, it’s a tour, where you involve and participate in hands-on activities in a community, where you would be in a homestay and doing activities with the local people. An ecotour also includes interaction with the nature, like trekking, etc…
The goal of this project is to create an ecotourism in Bangkern Phal village, Romtum commune, Rovieng district, Preah Vihear province. It’s an indigenous community with about 800 people living there. They have a few hectares of forests as well, which is being preserve and destroy at the same time. Therefore, creating an ecotourism site there will bring more tourists there and people will start to preserve the forests the environment, also their indigenous culture and traditions.
In order to create an ecotourism site, there are so many different things we need to confirm and get done such as:
- The community opinions (How do they feel about having an ecotourism site?)
- The tourists interests (Are they willing to go, if we were to create one?)
- The tour companies (If we create one, will they recommend the tourists to visit?)
Theses are just three main things we need to know, but there are tons more work to get done. For this round, we mainly focus on the market research and the community opinions. That should be the first thing to do as well, because if the community doesn’t agree or doesn’t want any tourists to visit their community, then the project is over and if the tourists aren’t interested, then the project is also over. That’s why these two questions are so important.
After interviewing about 250 tourists in Phnom Penh, more than 80% of them wanted to go. This data shows that this project might have a chance to go on and actually develop the place to be an ecotourism site. We also went on a field trip to the place that we’re planning to create the ecotourism site and they seem to be very happy and interested in this project. In addition, they are willing to help and make this project actually happened.
This round ends with a report, where we write what we did in this round. Next round will be another group of students, where they will study the feasibility of the location. We need to find out about the potentials of the place that we are going to create the ecotourism site, so that will be next round’s main goal. Finally, learning about ecotourism didn’t just teach me about ecotourism, but instead it taught me a whole lot different things like market research and business report proposal.