Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
opportunities were available to users by integrating the setting with visitor/
user priorities and preferences. The ROS has served as an additional tool
combined with management plans where regions that are capable of with-
standing high traffic are earmarked for more intensive forms of visitor use.
The ROS framework was adopted and modified by tourism scholars,
creating first a generic tourism one (TOS) (Butler & Waldbrook, 1991). It was
partially applied to adventure travel in the Canadian Arctic, then ecotourism
(ECOS) (Boyd & Butler, 1996), in forest-based ecotourism in Northern
Ontario, indigenous peoples' cultural tourism (IPCOST) (Sofield & Birtles,
1996) and urban tourism (UTOS) (Jansen-Verbeke & Lievois, 1999). Given
the relative similarities of possible settings for ROS, TOS and ECOS, it is not
surprising that the TOS and ECOS adopted in broad terms the management
factors designed by Clark & Stankey (1979). The frameworks for IPCOST
and UTOS deviated from the original ROS, opting instead to follow a phased
approach and establish 'opportunity sets', respectively (Timothy & Boyd,
2003). Table 7.8 highlights how the original ROS has been modified to suit
the TOS given its focus on levels of adventure and the ECOS as it examines
opportunity for ecotourists.
The extent to which these models have been adopted by resource manag-
ers has been somewhat disappointing, with some exceptions with ROS
within wilderness and protected spaces in the US, New Zealand (Driver
et al. , 1987) and more recently Japan, where ROS was deliberately used to
improve trail classifications in national parks (cf. Oishi, 2013). This limited
adoption should not be surprising given government agencies' preference for
management through traditional approaches, such as management plans.
These approaches tend to be more popular with academics in discussions of
visitor management or planning and managing tourism impacts (cf. Timothy
& Boyd, 2003; Hall & McArthur, 1998; Hall & Lew, 2009).
Of most relevance here is the value of these opportunity frameworks in
assisting with administering linear spaces, given that the tools were designed
to help cope with wilderness regions, national parks and other protected
areas. All three frameworks were designed within a North American context
of isolated and relatively large publicly-managed conservation, recreation and
tourism spaces, and the direct link to enabling trail and route managers is
that these linear corridors are recognized as key ways visitors can access the
different opportunities. The access system and its various components
within ROS (roads and trails) when further broken down for TOS (rivers,
game trails, gravel and paved roads) and ECOS (waterways, trails, loose sur-
face, logging and paved roads) (see Butler & Waldbrook, 1991; Boyd & Butler,
1996), form part of the wider space that is under agency management, and
should therefore be managed as part of users' opportunities to experience
their route-based settings.
UTOS did not follow the rubric of the ROS. Jansen-Verbeke and Lievois
(1999) viewed the opportunity classes in ROS as 'opportunity sets' when
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