Tourism Impacts, Planning and Management

Peter Mason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000060546
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Gestione
• Index: Business

Tourism Impacts, Planning and Management is a unique text, which links the three crucial areas of tourism: impacts, planning and management.

Tourism impacts are multifaceted and are therefore difficult to plan for and manage. This title looks at all the key players involved– be they tourists, host communities or industry members– and considers a number of approaches and techniques for managing tourism impacts successfully.

Now in its Fourth Edition, this bestselling text has been fully revised to include:

• new material on overtourism, dark tourism, child sex tourism in South East Asia, festival tourism, regional development and Artificial Intelligence

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• updated tourism data and statistics

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• new case studies on the economic impacts of tourism in France, the20 places most reliant on tourism in 2018, Fáilte Ireland's survey of good environmental practice in the industry, corporate social responsibility, as well as the above topical issues in tourism

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• an updated Companion WebsitethatincludesPowerPoints, video and web links and a case study archive.

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The text is written in an accessible style and includes a plethora of features that engage and aid understanding. This accessible yet academically rigorous introduction to tourism impacts, planning and management is essential reading for all tourism students.

PART 1

Tourism growth, development and impacts

Chapter 1

Social change and the growth of tourism

Learning objectives

At the end of this chapter you should:

• be aware of a variety of definitions of tourism;
• be aware of a number of dimensions and components of tourism, viz. the components of the tourism industry, motivations for tourism, tourism systems, data limitations in tourism; and
• understand major social and economic changes that have contributed to the growth of tourism.

Introduction

Tourism is now a global industry involving hundreds of millions of people in international as well as domestic travel each year. The World Tourism Organization (WTO, 2014) indicated that there were for the first time more than 1 billion international travellers in 2012. By 2017 this figure had reached 1.39 billion international travellers, which amounts to over 15 per cent of the world’s population (WTO, 2018). Although some of this activity may comprise the same travellers involved in more than one journey per year – and hence the precise scale of tourism as an industry is in some doubt (Leiper, 1999) – tens of millions of people globally work directly in the industry and many more are employed indirectly. Hundreds of millions of people are on the receiving end of tourism activity as they live in what are termed destination areas, in supposed ‘host’ populations. Millions of dollars are spent each year on advertising and promoting holidays and tourism products.

For much of recorded history, travel was uncomfortable, expensive, difficult and frequently dangerous (Williams, 1998). Yet journeys were undertaken, and this implies some strong motivating factors. However, it is only in the last 175 years, particularly the last 100 years, as travel has become more affordable and less difficult, that some of those who travelled were prepared to openly admit that pleasure was one of the motivations for their journeys.

As recently as the early 1960s tourism was an activity in which relatively few participated regularly, and it was primarily confined to Europe, North America and a small number of locations in other parts of the world. International travel, prior to the 1960s, was still largely the preserve of a wealthy minority who had the money (as well the time) to afford long-distance sea or air travel. Major changes in the second half of the twentieth century led to the rapid and massive growth of the phenomenon known as modern tourism. For example, these changes contributed to the Pacific region/East Asia becoming the fastest-growing area for international tourism in the period from 1985–2005. In 1975 East Asia and the Pacific region accounted for only 4 per cent of international tourist arrivals, but by 1995 the share of world arrivals had increased to almost 15 per cent (Pearce, 1995) and by 2006 to 20 per cent (WTO, 2007); and this figure was almost 24 per cent in 2017 (WTO, 2018). It should be noted that this change has occurred at a time when tourist numbers were growing globally. The increase in the share of international tourist arrivals in the Pacific region therefore indicates a very significant increase in actual tourists between 1975 and 2017. There were approximately 78 million visitor arrivals in the Pacific region/East Asia in 1995 (Pearce, 1995). This compares with approximately 100 million in the combined area of North and South America and 305 million in Europe in 1995 (Pearce, 1995). By 2017 there were as many as 713 million international tourist arrivals in Europe and 343 million international tourist arrivals in the Pacific/Asia region (WTO, 2018).

With over 700 million international arrivals accounting for 51 per cent of international arrivals in 2017, Europe remained, in the early part of the twenty-first century, the single most important region for international travel arrivals (WTO, 2018), although this percentage had fallen from 55 per cent in 2006 (WTO, 2007). In fact, as Table. 1.1 shows, in 2017 Europe had five countries in the top ten tourism destinations – France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and Germany, with France (first in the top ten) and Spain (second in the top ten) having combined totals accounting for 20 per cent of total international arrivals (World Atlas, 2019).

Table 1.1 World’s most visited countries, 2017

Rank	County	International visitor arrivals (millions)
1	France	86.9
2	Spain	81.8
3	USA	76.9
4	China	60.7
5	Italy	58.3
6	Mexico	39.3
7	United Kingdom	37.7
8	Turkey	37.6
9	Germany	37.5
10	Thailand	35.4

Source: World Atlas (2019)

This introductory chapter considers what has made this growth possible. It involves discussion of a number of economic and social factors, explores changing attitudes to travel, and presents a discussion of how opportunities for travel have increased.

Key perspectives

Definitions of tourism and tourists

Although this book is an introductory text to tourism planning and management at undergraduate level, some understanding of the nature of tourism is assumed. However, as there is no full agreement on the meaning of the term tourism or complete agreement on what a tourist is, this section contains a brief discussion of these concepts as they are clearly important in relation to the planning and management of tourism.

In the early 1980s Matthieson and Wall (1982: 1) indicated that tourism comprised:

The temporary movement of people to destinations outside their normal places of work and residence, the activities undertaken during the stay in those destinations, and the facilities created to cater for their needs.

In 1991, in an attempt to assist those compiling statistics on tourism, the World Tourism Organization created a definition that reads:

The activities of a person travelling outside his or her usual environment for less than a specified period of time whose main purpose of travel is other than for exercise of an activity remunerated from the place visited.

It is perhaps not surprising that most definitions of the term ‘tourist’ are based on the concept of tourism, and usually such definitions make reference to the need for the tourist to spend at least one night in a destination to which they have travelled. Tourists are usually distinguished from excursionists in such definitions, as an excursionist, according to Prosser (1998), is someone who visits and leaves without staying a night in a destination. However, as Prosser suggested, it is relatively common for the two terms – excursionist and tourist – to be combined. The term ‘visitor’ is often used in preference to either tourist or excursionist. Theobold (1994), for example, used the concept of ‘visitor’ to combine the elements of a tourists and excursionist.

The WTO (WTO, 2008) has also made use of the term ‘visitor’ and additionally makes reference to the significance of travel in relation to tourism. Its updated 1991 definition of the activity (as indicated above) is as follows:

A visitor is a traveller taking a trip to a destination outside his/her usual environment, for less than a year, for any main purpose (business, leisure or other personal purpose) other than to be employed by a resident entity in the country or place visited. These trips taken by visitors qualify as tourism trips. Tourism refers to the activity of visitors.

The definitions above make no reference to the impacts of tourism. However, impacts are key factors to any discussion of the planning and management of tourism. Jafari (1981: 3) did include reference to impacts in his definition when he stated that:

Tourism is a study of man (sic) away from his usual habitat, of the industry which responds to his needs and the impacts that both he and the industry have for the host socio-cultural, economic and physical environments.

However, when discussing the impacts of tourism a classification such as that presented above involving terms such as excursionist or tourist to distinguish different types of visitor is not particularly helpful. For example, in relation to the environmental impacts of the feet of a walker on a natural or semi-natural landscape, it matters little whether the person involved is classified as a tourist or an excursionist; the feet will have the same effect! As the actions of day visitors (excursionists) and those of longer stayers may be almost indistinguishable, the view that a definition of tourism does not need reference to an overnight stay was becoming far more acceptable at the end of the ...