ABSTRACT
Nature-based tourism destinations are vulnerable to visitation impacts. They need to protect the resource on which they depend whilst simultaneously offering high-quality visitor experiences. Indeed, it is crucial for tourism businesses who plan for tourism products and experiences to consider the environments that these will take place in. Many industries have developed and applied frameworks for sustainable product development; tourism, however, still largely draws on broad sustainability frameworks that address the destination as a whole rather than individual or sets of products. This chapter addresses this gap in the literature by positing a framework for sustainable tourism product development for high-quality nature-based visitor experiences. Using the Double Diamond Design Process as a basis, we propose a Triple Diamond Design Process that explicitly features sustainability as a concern in the development phase and that can guide processes around sustainable tourism product development in nature-based tourism. The model can be adapted to suit protected area (PA) and conservation contexts and their specific requirements. It posits a user-centred, evidence-based approach to product development to ensure a close fit between visitor expectations/abilities and values and product and experience offerings which will benefit businesses as well as visitors.
