TOURIST ATTRACTIVENESS OF RAMSAR WETLANDS. CASE STUDY: LAKES OF CHAMPAGNE HUMIDE (FRANCE) AND COMANA NATURAL PARK (ROMANIA)

Luc Florent*, Gabriela Toroimac**

*Groupe ESC TROYES, Troyes, France
**University of Bucarest, Faculty of Geography, Bucharest, Romania

Abstract

It is difficult to understand what contributes to tourist attractiveness of a territory. Labels have an important role, because they guarantee the quality of destination. Even if several labels have a different initial function, they may turn into important elements of tourism advertising, like in the cases of UNESCO and Natural Park labels. Besides these highly promoted labels, there are others less known by the general public, but prestigious for professionals, like the Ramsar label. Ramsar label is related to the homonymous convention signed in 1971; Ramsar List includes wetlands considered of international importance for waterfowl at any season and also in term of ecology, botany, zoology, limnology and hydrology. Tourism scientific literature ignores the attractiveness of the Ramsar label. Therefore the main goal of our paper is to analyse the Ramsar label as an element of tourist attractiveness. Our study is conducted on two Ramsar wetlands: Lakes of Champagnes Humide in France and Comana Natural Park in Romania. Our contribution relies on exploratory questionnaires, focused on tourists’ motivation for choosing theses destinations; the questions concern mainly their perception of nature protection and conservation, recognition of environmental protection labels, main reason of their journey, their interest for leisure activities, and the distance from their place of residence. Nature protection and conservation is perceived as important by 83% of the interrogated tourists. Therefore 31% of the questioned French tourists and 5% of the Romanian tourist declare to have taken into account the status of protection before choosing their destination. Only 17% of the French tourists and 5% of Romanian tourists are familiarised with Ramsar label, which seems to be rather unknown to the general public; tourist know what is being protected inside the two areas (wetlands and, especially, waterfowl), but they don’t associate it to the Ramsar label. Tourists are mostly attracted by leisure activities. The two areas are attractive at a regional or national scale and they are practically unknown on the international level despite their prestigious Ramsar label. This situation may be explained by the restrictiveness of the Ramsar label which concern only one ecosystem and the lack of communication regarding this label. Therefore, we suggest that communication activities on this label need to be boosted in order to increase tourism frequentation, which would require another management to continue to preserve the site.

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