Andrea BERG
Garden visits – an upcoming way of spending your holiday

(Summary)

Garden visits, as part of our holidays, are becoming more and more popular nowadays. There are a number of reasons for this positive tendency: firstly as our home and kitchen gardens became more important in our everyday life we look back on professional, historic gardens; secondly garden visits, as a program, are incorporated and offered by many branches of the tourist industry (such as ecotourism, culture tourism, heritage tourism, etc.).

Although visiting famous and historic gardens had always been a popular pastime, this modern age garden tourism has started in the 1980s. Restoration of historic gardens on the large scale and appealing marketing resulted in an increase of visitor numbers: some gardens are visited by more than one million people in a year and there are many places with number of visitors between 500,000 and 1,000,000. Owing to the thorough marketing research of recent years we get to know the type of people who like visiting these gardens, their motivation; hence the number of gardens and visitor centres which offer a wider selection of programmes and events are rising.