Are You an Adventure Travel Expert?

Adventure Travel: A Niche Tourism

• Adventure travel is a type of niche tourism that involves exploration or travel with a certain degree of risk and may require special skills and physical exertion.
• Adventure tourism has grown in recent decades in the United States, but lack of a clear operational definition has hampered measurement of market size and growth.
• Adventure travel may be any tourist activity that includes physical activity, a cultural exchange, and connection with nature, according to the Adventure Travel Trade Association.
• Adventure tourists may have the motivation to achieve mental states characterized as rush or flow, resulting from stepping outside their comfort zone.
• Adventure sports tourism has traditionally been dominated by men, although women's participation has grown.
• Access to inexpensive consumer technology, with respect to Global Positioning Systems, flashpacking, social networking, and photography, have increased the worldwide interest in adventure travel.
• Adventurer travelers began to push to the limits, with the mountaineering of Matterhorn in 1865 and the river rafting on the Colorado River in 1869.
• There is a trend for developing tourism specifically for the disabled. Adventure travel for the disabled has become a US$13 billion a year industry in North America.
• Extreme tourism involves travel to dangerous (extreme) locations or participation in dangerous events or activities.
• Jungle tourism is a subcategory of adventure travel defined by active multifaceted physical means of travel in the jungle regions of the earth.
• Overlanding is a form of extended adventure holiday, embarking on a long journey, often in a group.
• Scuba diving is a sport in which participants explore underwater places while inhaling compressed air from tanks.