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This article examines the emergence of the “soft‐ecotourism” market and measures the extend of familiarity with ecotourism and the willingness of resort travellers to substitute, partially or totally, their vacation with an ecotourism experience. education, income and age are positively associated with ecotourism, while women and singles are a more in favour towards a substitution to ecotourism. The study indicates that there is confusion as to what constitutes ecotourism and the authors suggest that tourism agencies should be more actively engaged in explaining ecotourism to their potential clients.

Travelling is no longer associated with the word “travail” (labour) and there is a profusion of available information on all dimensions of any kind of trip, such that there is little room for uncertainty (Leiper, 1983). Yet we are accustomed to hearing complaints from tourists who are unsatisfied with their tourist experience. Sources of unsatisfaction are numerous (Von Raaij and Francken, 1984; Mazursky, 1989). They can include supply factors: accommodation, transportation, food, prices, (external factors) as well as personal factors (internal attribution). Von Raaij and Francken (1984) postulated that vacationers who attribute their dissatisfaction to external factors are more dissatisfied than vacationers who attribute their dissatisfaction to themselves. However, in general, measures of satisfaction have received less than expected attention by scholars due to its linkage with “motivation”: “As expected, there was considerable similarity between motivation and satisfaction dimensions” (Ross and Iso‐Ahola, 1991). Moreover, satisfaction is often related to a particular tourist experience (discrete events) and not necessarily to the broader case of the pleasure vacation (Geva and Goldman, 1991; Mazursky, 1989). Thus, there is a need to identify factors which account for variations in the level of tourist satisfaction without specific reference to a particular tourist site. Traditionally tourist satisfaction was basically explained by the following general model: