Equally important is the fact that even those who want to adapt can't, because everything has perforce been committed to before they left home. The unfortunate fact is that what has to be sold is more the image of the tour than the experience of the tour, because the tourist has to buy and pay for the tour before experiencing it. No matter how wonderful the tour is, it won't sell if it doesn't promise (in advance) what people think (in advance) they want, or think will be appropriate. What they find they want, or decide would be appropriate, when they get there matters much less.
Even some tour operators admit, in confidence, to arranging trips in a way that they themselves would never choose, but that "the customers want." If prepaid tourists discover on arrival that what they thought they wanted, and have already bought, is culturally or ecologically inappropriate, they are stuck. Travelers who make their arrangements locally are more likely to notice, and at least have a chance to consider before committing themselves, the implications of the style of travel they are contemplating.
I don't want to seem too critical. I strongly support ecotourism. I do want to encourage travelers to acknowledge responsibility for their effects on the physical and cultural ecology of the places they visit, and to use the lessons they learn from travel to live more responsibly when they return home.
Ecotourism operators run the gamut from politically committed, money-losing environmental organizations to utterly unprincipled hucksters looking for new