ABSTRACT
The ideal figure of a hiker in Finnish Lapland is a Jack-London-type lonely wolf surviving easily in wilderness. In reality, however, there is an emerging market for soft adventure holidays offering convenient, risk-assessed and quality-assured hiking experiences for people with little wilderness experience. Since busy city dwellers are seen to be accustomed to walking paved urban streets during their everyday life and seem to prefer participation in easily accessed holidays, current commercial hiking holidays are described in terms of easiness of accessing beautiful scenery, convenience, and no-need-for-previous-experience. Besides busy international city dwellers, who seem to be the primary market of these holidays, elderly people find the commercial hiking holidays highly attractive. For example, according to Patterson and Pegg (2009), “Baby Boomers” have demonstrated that they are willing participants in new and adventurous forms of leisure and are opting for more physically challenging and “adrenalin-driven” experiences.
