in destination countries in the Third or Fourth World. Which is another way of saying that tourist services purchased locally in a Third World destination country would typically cost no more than half what they would cost as part of a tour prearranged through a First World operator. Tour travel itself, moreover, is skewed toward more expensive, usually meaning higher-impact, travel.
Few people would knowingly pay twice as much to arrange a tour through an operator in their own country if they believed themselves capable of arranging it locally, or doing it themselves independently. So tour operators have a vested interest in promoting fear, disempowerment, and ignorance on the part of would-be travelers, and in keeping people from learning how to travel on their own, as part of persuading them that they can't or wouldn't want to travel on their own and that it's worth paying the price to book a tour in advance.
To compound the problem, most self-styled ecotourism publications are financed primarily by advertising from tour operators, and thus can ill afford to criticize or to provide information that would reduce the market for the products of the industry on whom their existence depends.
There is an obvious contradiction between persuading people that they need a tour operator as an intermediary between themselves and the local people and environment, and persuading people to immerse themselves in and learn about the local environment.
Prearranged tours add foreign agents, middlemen, and communications and money-transfer costs to the costs of services provided in the destination country, thus greatly inflating the price of travel. And those agents and middlemen all have an incentive to push tourists to more expensive tours to maximize their commissions. Because travel on a tour basis is more expensive, people on tours are, on average, richer people (or at least people traveling more expensively) than independent travelers. And there's the rub, or at least part of it.
Wealth is power. The more expensively tourists are traveling, the more power they wield to have the local environment altered to suit their needs and desires. And, quite frankly, richer people are more accustomed than poorer people to having their desires accommodated regardless of the consequences for others. They frequently have higher expectations of Western norms of luxury and service, and are less culturally diverse than a more economically diverse range of tourists would be. The result is these tourists create greater material and cultural pressures to reshape the local environment in a Western mold than would an equal number of tourists traveling more cheaply.
The poorest tourists simply don't have the economic clout to transform their destinations. They have to learn the local culture and language, even perhaps studying them before they arrive, to survive and get around. They stay in the places local people stay, eat the local food, and use the local mass transportation. Having more time than money, and being more dependent on local goodwill, they are compelled to be both more patient and more tolerant. They can't afford to change things much, and they leave them pretty much as they found them.