RESEARCH ARTICLE The Customer Isn't Always Right— Conservation and Animal Welfare Implications of the Increasing Demand for Wildlife Tourism

Tourism accounts for 9 % of global GDP and comprises 1.1 billion tourist arrivals per annum. Visits to wildlife tourist attractions (WTAs) may account for 20–40 % of global tour-ism, but no studies have audited the diversity of WTAs and their impacts on the conserva-tion status and welfare of subject animals. We scored these impacts for 24 types of WTA, visited by 3.6–6 million tourists per year, and compared our scores to tourists ’ feedback on TripAdvisor. Six WTA types (impacting 1,500–13,000 individual animals) had net positive conservation/welfare impacts, but 14 (120,000–340,000 individuals) had negative conser-vation impacts and 18 (230,000–550,000 individuals) had negative welfare impacts. Despite these figures only 7.8 % of all tourist feedback on these WTAs was negative due to conservation/welfare concerns. We demonstrate that WTAs have substantial negative effects that are unrecognised by the majority of tourists, suggesting an urgent need for tour-ist education and regulation of WTAs worldwide