This paper examines how eco-tourism can be regarded as a change agent in the tourism economy in developing
countries. By using conceptual contributions from chaos theory, the authors illustrate how eco-tourism
might give competitive advantage, using South Africa as the empirical setting. Destinations focusing on chaos
theory when organizing their efforts within eco-tourism may be able to tailor make services to well-defined
market segments through the use of tacit knowledge. Future research may benefit from using untraditional
approaches found in the business literature.