Ecotourists’ Environmental Perception and Behavior in Taiwanese Aboriginal Tribes：A Case Study of The Smangus

Ecotourism is a traveling method that emphasizes resource conservations, sustainable development, economical benefits, local community development balance, and emphasis on participants' self control. This is now a popular way of traveling. More and more visitors travel to aboriginal tribes, combining natural scenery resources with aborigine culture of different diversities. It can be seen as one of Taiwan's special characteristics in Taiwan's development in ecotourism.

This research wants to understand the perception and behavior of tourists who are interested in tribal ecotourism. Using Smangus for example, we made not only accommodations analysis for two recent years, but also 298 questionnaires by random sampling.

Results of this research shows that most of the visitors turn out to be women , highly-educated, or around 25-34 years old. Tourists mostly come from northern or middle parts of Taiwan, and are more concerned about accommodations, food, and prices of merchandise. Tourists usually stay for two days, traveling mostly with cars and
buses, with cars as their first choice. They usually come in groups of 11-20, and order their meals with the tribe. Most tourists haven’t come here before, while there are a few who have traveled to other tribes, and approve of this kind of ecotourism.

You can tell from Smangus’ special traditional culture and natural scenery what tourists have in mind as their traveling motive, original and revised image of Smangus. We hope that when tourists come here, they can appreciate both the importance of both natural scenery and traditional culture. We hope that through this research, we can use this result to be a reference for future plannings of related management planning in the future.