Ecotourism is a type of tourism whose main goals provide social and economic stability to a local community at the same time as protecting the natural environment through tourist offers that combine interactive activity in nature with education about preserving the nature, local tradition, history and culture. European ecotourism spontaneously started in the European mountain areas and continued spreading across the world in the nineteen-eighties. Ecotourism has also reached Japan and South Korea, where the development started as a governmental strategy for solving social and economic problems in the rural area. Aims of this degree paper are to research the reasons for development, the degree of development and results that are visible on global and national level of the two Asian countries. Another aim is to introduce the background of the development, offers and promotion in Japan and South Korea and to summarize two farm tourisms’ case studies. When comparing the state of ecotourism based in the West, the Japanese and South Korean sources show that the definition is non-uniform. Japan and South Korea, in their ecotourism offers, include different types of tourism in nature, meanwhile the West has formed a much stricter system of ecotourism offer classification. The possibilities for additional ecotourism development are big. Much more effort should be put into the unification of the definition on the global level and more effort put into preserving the natural environment in Japan and South Korea.
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