Researching tourists in the outdoors: Challenges and experiences from protected areas in Sweden

In the Nordic countries, nature is an important tourist attraction and is one of the strongest brands in tourism promotion (Hall et al. 2009). Nature tourism is encouraged and supported in rural areas, and in protected areas, due to positive economic potentials leading to regional development (e.g. Eagles and Bushell 2007). Information on tourists is important at different levels and for different purposes in society. In spite of that, information on tourist use of nature, including national parks and other protected areas, is often very limited, particularly in countries and regions where there are no standardized measurements or reporting of tourist use (Watson et al. 2000; Kajala et al. 2007). A common difficulty in research that focuses on tourist use of larger nature areas is the challenge of finding people or, at least, reaching them in a systematic way. In Sweden, there is no tradition of undertaking systematic visitor surveys in protected areas and, as a result, the knowledge of visitor numbers, patterns and impacts are rather limited (Fredman 2004).