Domestic tourists’ experience in protected natural parks: A new trend in pandemic crisis?

Since December 2019, the Covid-19 pandemic crisis has led to profound changes around the world with a lot of interdictions or constraints to travel outside one's own country. One of the major consequences has been the development of proximity tourism in outdoor spaces less conducive to the spread of the virus. From a study preceding this pandemic, this article seeks to better understand the experiences lived by domestic tourists when they visited protected natural parks in their country. Beyond the health risks, it analyses the dimensions and the influences of experiences lived in these parks by French domestic tourists (n = 500) using Pine and Gilmore's 4Es model (1999). From a literature on the tourism experiences for domestic tourists adapted to natural parks and a critical review on the use and validation of Oh et al.'s scale (2007) in tourism, a structural equation model and a nested SEM show the positive relationship between three dimensions of the 4Es on the arousal and memory outcomes. Theoretically and methodologically speaking, this study extends the 4Es model in the direction of low arousal and mundane experiences for domestic tourists in protected natural parks, and questions Oh, Fiore, and Jeoung (2007) scale through the number of items, the use of EFA and the removal of the aesthetics dimension. This research can help managers of protected natural parks adapt their domestic tourists' experience offer during health crisis by implementing specific marketing strategies for low arousal and mundane experiences with more outdoor activities and digital services.