The relevance of visitors' national park affinity for effective visitor management in protected areas.

Abstract

This chapter introduces the concept of visitor affinity to the visitor management (VM) literature. It illustrates the basic possibilities and limits of segmentation by visitor affinity, within the framework of visitor monitoring in protected areas. For this purpose, different methodological procedures are identified and discussed in order to allow a better comparison between protected areas. Hereupon, guiding strategies for a target group-oriented VM are formulated. The Hohe Tauern National Park, Austria, is used as a case study for empirical research.