A clever twist on this work is the opportunity to go deep: to use their own words to “see” what the tourists saw. Once again, the concept is simple, but getting the searches correct is still a challenge. This part of the work was more of a trial, but we were able to categorise activities, facilities and wildlife. We found, for example that over 80% of attractions mentioned boating, including some 40% where kayaks or paddleboards were mentioned. Likewise, over a quarter of attractions mention birdlife, while monkeys, manatees and crocodiles or alligators are also regularly mentioned.
For us this work represents the beginning — we want to understand the role of other direct nature experiences, but also the importance of nature in the background, creating the views, the clean waters, the sand for the beaches, the seafood on the plates. We also need to build more accurate assessments of value.
For mangrove attractions, we still only have anecdotal numbers from a few sites. But even these should be enough to stop us in our tracks. In Puerto Rico, where our first reviewer above had her remarkable tour, there are well over 10,000 reviews for mangrove sites on TripAdvisor. The bigger mangrove attractions around the world are generating tens to hundreds of thousands of visitors annually, spending millions of dollars.