Responsible tourism is an essential issue of considerable concern to multiple stakeholders. Few studies focus on how specific academic courses increase future practitioners’ responsibility in tourism. This study employs nature-based experiential learning to inspire and enhance tourism students’ awareness of and capacity for responsible tourism. We apply mixed methods (i.e. pretest–posttest, observations and reflection memos) to justify the overall learning process. Findings demonstrate that the undergraduates’ responsible tourism-associated perception and capacity are improved. A nature-based experiential learning framework is proposed to provide insights into high-quality education for responsible tourism.

负责任的旅游是多个利益相关者非常关注的一个基本问题。很少有研究关注特定的学术课程如何增加未来从业者在旅游中的责任。本研究采用基于自然的体验式学习来激发和提高旅游学生对负责任旅游的意识和能力。我们应用混合方法（即前测-后测、观察和反思备忘录）来证明整个学习过程的合理性。结果表明，本科生负责任的旅游相关感知和能力得到了提高。提出了一个基于自然的体验式学习框架，为负责任的旅游提供高质量教育的见解。