The Deal
Visitors to Exmoor National Park this summer can earn a 20% discount at park centers by completing small environmental tasks. Pick up litter for two minutes, log three species on the iNaturalist app, post appreciation for the park on social media with a tag, or arrive by bike or bus instead of driving, and you qualify for the discount on your next purchase.
The pilot program runs through the end of September. Participants show evidence of their action at the point of purchase, whether that's a photo of collected trash, an app submission, or a social media post. The discount applies to a single transaction and can't be combined with other offers.
Exmoor National Park Authority (ENPA) launched the scheme on 1 July, drawing inspiration from Copenhagen's CopenPay initiative but adapting the concept for a rural setting. The Danish program, which debuted earlier this year, rewards tourists with free museum entry or meal vouchers for actions like cycling or bringing reusable containers.
Why a Park Wants Visitors to Work
Exmoor stretches across parts of Devon and Somerset in southwest England, covering moorlands, sea cliffs, and valleys that shelter rare temperate Atlantic rainforest habitats. The park receives roughly 1.6 million tourism visits each year, according to ENPA data.
That volume brings pressure. Litter accumulates along trails, wildlife habitats face disturbance, and car traffic clogs narrow rural roads. The discount scheme tries to flip the script by turning visitors into active participants in landscape care rather than passive consumers of scenery.
Dan James, enterprise and communications manager for ENPA, described the program as turning care into a shared currency that benefits multiple stakeholders at once. The hope is that small, repeated actions add up, both in practical impact and in shifting visitor mindset.
The Broader Strategy
The discount initiative sits within Exmoor's Good Tourism Plan, which aims for tourism that regenerates rather than depletes. The plan emphasizes resilience, productivity, and ensuring that local communities, businesses, and landscapes all gain from visitor spending and activity.
Regenerative tourism has gained traction as a framework that goes beyond sustainability's goal of doing less harm. Instead, it asks whether tourism can actively improve places, whether through ecological restoration, community investment, or cultural preservation. In practice, that often means redesigning how destinations engage visitors.
Exmoor's approach is transactional by design. The park is betting that immediate, tangible rewards will motivate behaviors that might otherwise feel optional or inconvenient. A discount offers a clearer incentive than abstract appeals to environmental responsibility.
What Happens Next
ENPA has signaled that this summer's pilot is a starting point. If the scheme proves effective, the authority plans to expand it by bringing in more businesses, organizations, and partners across the park.
Success will likely hinge on participation rates and whether the actions generate measurable environmental benefit. Two minutes of litter picking per visitor might not sound like much, but multiplied across thousands of participants over a summer, it could make a visible difference on popular trails. Wildlife data uploaded to iNaturalist contributes to biodiversity monitoring, which helps land managers track ecosystem health over time.
The social media component is trickier. Posting appreciation for a landscape doesn't clean a stream or protect a habitat, but it does function as peer-to-peer marketing that could influence how others visit the park. Whether that trade-off feels worthwhile depends on how much weight you place on reach versus direct impact.
The Bigger Question
Exmoor's experiment raises a question that destinations worldwide are grappling with: can you incentivize your way to better tourism? Discounts, perks, and rewards can change behavior in the short term, but they also risk creating a transactional relationship where people only act when there's something in it for them.
The alternative is deeper engagement, education that reshapes how people understand their role in a place. That takes more time and doesn't fit neatly into a summer pilot program. For now, Exmoor is testing whether a small nudge, paired with a tangible reward, can shift how 1.6 million annual visitors interact with a protected landscape. The answer will likely inform how other rural parks approach the same challenge.
