Going to See Animals: an Analysis of Tourist Offerings for Wildlife Observation in the French Alps

This article presents an exploratory work and analysis of the tourist packages for wildlife observation located in the French Alps. The purpose of this work is to question the valuation of animals as a tourist resource and its inclusion in territorial processes and tourist diversification. Hence, a quantitative survey method of the offerings available on the territory has been developed. This has led to a corpus of 172 tourist offerings, which is the basis for developing this article. A statistical analysis involving the creation of a typology of the offers listed made it possible to identify four main forms of tourism around wild animals. These offers were then mapped to explore the spatial anchorage of these tourist practices; thereby underlining the diffuse and spontaneous character of these offers. Indeed, rather than being linked to one or more concerted territorial policies, the tourist diversification processes around wildlife observation are the result of the addition of individual intentions to enhance the value of wild animals.