Managing Sustainable Tourism

A Legacy for the Future

David L. Edgell Sr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000701197
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Industrie de l'hôtellerie, du voyage et du tourisme

Managing Sustainable Tourism tackles the tough issues within the tourism industry, such as impacts on the natural and built environment and concerns for the history, heritage, and culture of local communities to provide answers that produce positive and quality economic growth for the tourism industry. It offers practical policies and plans for fostering harmonious relationships among local communities, the private sector, not-for-profit organizations academic institutions, and governments at all levels, as well as developing management practices and philosophies for the protection of natural, built, and cultural environments while reinforcing positive and orderly economic growth. It also confronts and explains the challenges on the tourism industry with respect to overtourism, climate change and global warming.

Since the second edition, there have been many important developments in the field of sustainable tourism, and this third edition presents updated research and information in the following ways:

• 
  
  

• Updated content to reflect issues and trends, including new directions in sustainable tourism development;

• 
  
  

• New and updated international case studies of successes and failures to reflect current challenges and practices;

• 
  
  

• A partial history of sustainable tourism from ancient times to the present;

• 
  
  

• New concepts in sustainable tourism practices such as overtourism and undertourism;

• 
  
  

• Transformative leadership and policies and their impact on sustainable tourism development.

This volume provides a wealth of information and guidance on managing sustainable tourism and it will be invaluable to educators, students, developers, entrepreneurs, strategic planners and policymakers.

Chapter 1
A philosophic approach to managing sustainable tourism

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

—Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”, 1916

In introducing a “philosophic approach to sustainable tourism” it is sometimes suggested that travelers visit the destination “less traveled by” in order to protect the natural environment of a local area. The current transformation taking place with respect to the philosophic approach to the field of sustainable tourism is changing the outlook for the future of international tourism. Since 2016, the tourism sector has introduced a multitude of new words, expressions, phrases and concepts to describe the diversity of changes taking place in sustainable tourism development. For example, the portmanteau word “overtourism” was first mentioned in 2012 but introduced more formally in 2016 by CEO and founder of the Skift company to describe the potential negative impact of tourism in Iceland. In addition, in 2016, Geoffrey Lipman and Felix Dodds founded the Strong Universal Network (SUNx), in effect, a new system for tourism destinations and stakeholders to build climate resilience in line with the target of the Paris Agreement (2015) through climate-friendly travel. Another important aspect of understanding sustainable tourism is to reflect on its origins from a historical perspective. Also, in 2016, the United Nations declared that “2017 is the United Nations International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development”. In 2017, as a fundamental part of this necessary awareness on sustainable tourism, the Responsible Tourism Institute launched the “#TOURISM17” campaign, an initiative aimed to promote sustainable tourism development. Then in 2018, in many parts of the world, the cliché “plogging” (from Sweden), meaning to pick up trash while jogging, became a clarion call for a cleaner environment. In 2019, climate change and global warming was high on the sustainable tourism agenda shortly after it was announced by the U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces in 2018 was 1.42°F (0.79°C) above the 20th century average. This was the fourth highest year, among all years, in the 1880–2018 record, behind 2016 (highest), 2015 (second highest), and 2017 (third highest). Nine of the ten warmest years have occurred since 2005, with the last five years (2014–2018) ranking as the five warmest years on record.¹

Sustainability is possibly the most important contemporary issue facing the tourism industry in the twenty-first century due to the rapid growth of the global tourism industry. It is well recognized in the tourism community that we have a finite earth that must be conserved, protected, and nurtured and that we all have a stake in assuring that future tourism growth be of high quality and sustained for future generations to enjoy. This is an acknowledgment that sustainable tourism is a part of an overall shift that recognizes that orderly economic growth, combined with concerns for the environment and quality-of-life social values, will be the driving force for long-term progress in tourism policies for development. The tourism industry is beginning to realize that tourism development needs to be planned and well-managed. Defining attributes of sustainability in the context of innovative directions of sustainable tourism development, as noted in the prior paragraph, is currently taking place.²

International tourism, like many other industries, is faced with an impending dilemma as to whether it can maintain its dynamic growth rate without damaging or destroying the natural and built environments, both of which must be conserved and sustained if future generations are to enjoy the same benefits of travel and tourism as today’s do. The tourism industry is conscious of the need to maintain the social, cultural, environmental, and economic attributes that are basic to its positive development. To ensure that this happens, the global travel and tourism industry will need strong leadership and an effective international sustainable tourism policy.³ In brief, value-based leadership, a strong international sustainable tourism policy, dynamic strategic planning, and good management will be the hallmarks crucial to economic prosperity, sustainability and quality-of-life opportunities for communities and global destinations in the future.⁴

The tourism stage in the twenty-first century presents profound challenges to all actors involved in the tourism industry. Consumers of tourism in the current millennium are demanding greater quality in their tourism products. They want new and different destinations, greater variety, and more flexibility in their travels. Increasingly tourists are expressing a desire for a clean environment, nature tourism experiences, adventure travel activities, and tourism products that include culture, heritage, and history. In response, more destinations have become interested in developing higher-quality tourism products and have placed greater emphasis on the natural environment and the built environment, which includes historic, heritage, and cultural sites. Furthermore, international organizations, businesses, government, academia, not-for-profit, and local tourism leaders are now more likely to focus their attention on the need to develop and promote sustainability based on preserving the resources on which tourism’s success depends. They want to manage sustainable tourism as a legacy to ensure that their children and grandchildren can enjoy a wide variety of quality tourism products. The result is that today’s tourism destinations and products, more than ever before, are now more concerned with being compatible with the environment, both natural and constructed.⁵

This first chapter will present a general understanding about the travel and tourism industry and explain some of the basic principles of the tourism industry, its powerful economic impact, and a discussion of international organizations that contribute to the overall concerns for quality tourism programs. It introduces the topic of sustainable tourism and describes such sub-sets of sustainable tourism as ecotourism, geotourism, responsible tourism and cultural tourism to form the basis for a better understanding of the concept of sustainable tourism. It also mentions the notion of “peace through tourism” as part of the overall philosophy of sustainability. Much of the information for this first chapter has been updated and refined from the prior edition of Managing Sustainable Tourism: A Legacy for the Future (2016).

Chapter 2 will take on the task of introducing the reader to a historical perspective of elements of sustainable tourism through the eyes of a few selected worldly travelers. Ancient travelers and others of an earlier period were just as mesmerized by edifices, nature, and stories about the history and culture in the countries they visited as we are today. Later travelers, many of them explorers and naturalists, noted the beauty of the natural and built environments, the amazing differing unique species of flora and fauna, and a general interest in protecting such resources for future generations to enjoy. Fortunately, many of the worldly travelers authored books and publications that allow us to see the world as they saw it and to follow the transformation of changes in travel in the world of today.

Understanding tourism

In this book, the term “tourism” is used synonymously with all aspects of travel and tourism, unless otherwise specified. With respect to international tourism, this text uses the following definitions as recommended by the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO; note that functions of the UNWTO will be described later in this chapter).

• International visitor: Any person visiting a country (or community), other than that in which the person usually resides, for any reason other than following an occupation remunerated from within the country visited. This definition covers two classes of visitors: tourist and excursionist.
• Tourist: A temporary visitor staying at least 24 hours in the country (or community) visited, the purpose of whose journey can be classified under one of the following headings: (a) leisure, recreation, holiday, health, study, religion, or sport; or (b) business, family, mission, or meeting.
• Excursionist: A temporary visitor staying less than 24 hours in the country (or community) visited (including travelers on cruises).
• Tourism: In terms of balance-of-trade accounting, tourism is defined as travel and transportation and is determined as a business service export from the tourism recipient to the tourism generating economy.
• Domestic Tourist: A domestic tourist is a visitor traveling within a country. The definition of a domestic tourist varies from country to country.

Tourism is an inherently complex field of inquiry with many different components depending on the circumstances and the country or community involved. It is a multifaceted industry of many, sometimes unrelated parts, resisting comparability within itself and with other industries. It is an industry that cuts across many different constituent components, as indicated in Table 1.1 below.

The study of tourism incorporates such human science topics as anthropology, archaeology, geography, demography, economics, history, sociology, and natural philosophy. It includes such physical science topics as earth science, climatology, environmental science, ecology, space travel, various aspects of technology, and other related fields of study. Despite the complexities of the tourism industry, tourism in and of itself is basically the practice of traveling for business and pleasure.

The tourism industry is composed of businesses that provide various products, services, and facilities associated with tourist travel. Tourism is not a single industry but, instead, an amalgam of industry sectors – a demand force and a supply market, a personal experience, and a complicated international phenomenon. Tourism incorporates social, cultural, and environmental concerns beyond physical development and marketing. The tourism industry, like many other industries, is faced with an impending dilemma as to whether it can maintain its dynamic growth rate without damaging or destroying the natural and built environments, both of which must be conserved and sustained if future generations are to enjoy the same benefits of travel and tourism as today’s travelers do.

Table 1.1 Selected sectors of the tourism industry

The tourism industry encompasses both supply and demand, more than the sum of marketing and economic development. As the world’s most dynamic industry, it demands a constant reassessment of its quality, variety, and sustainably for the future of the industry. Because the tourism industry is such a fast-growing industry, it must be mindful of potential issues and directions that could lead to disastrous impacts on the industry, especially its sustainability. For this reason, it is necessary to understand its powerful impact on the natural and built environment so that well-constructed policies, plans, and management practices can be put in place to ensure its future quality growth. This book will discuss the many aspects of managing sustainable tourism. The travel and tourism industry, as one of the world’s largest industries, both has an impact and depends on the global sustainability of economies, ecologies, climate, nature, cultures, and the built environments.

The popular textbook Tourism: Principles, Practices, Philosophies (twelfth edition, 2012) defines tourism as “the processes, activities, and outcomes arising from the relationships and the interactions among tourists, tourism suppliers, host governments, host communities, and surrounding environments that are involved in the attracting and hosting of visitors.”⁶ Tourism has strong links to cultural and social pursuits, foreign policy initiatives, economic development, environmental goals, and sustainable development planning. Tourism includes the buying, selling, and management of services and products (to tourists) that might range from buying hotel rooms to selling souvenirs or managing an airline. To accomplish these complex activities, tourism demands the most creative and innovative managers and employees, because much of the tourism industry represents collections of perishable products needing immediate daily attention. For example, if hotel rooms, airline seats, cruise line cabins, or restaurant tables are not filled daily and repeatedly, the point-of-sale moments to generate revenues from these products are lost forever. There is no opportunity to put such unsold products on sale at a later time, or to keep them in storage, or to maintain them in inventory. This perishability factor distinguishes tourism from consumer goods, such as automobiles, sunglasses, or sports equipment and puts additional pressure on hospitality and tourism managers when dealing with employees and customers.

Tourism is also wide-ranging in the sense that it demands products from other sectors of the economy. For example, for the economy of many countries the major products may be agricultural products such as leaf tobacco, cotton, or grains to meet the demand of the world markets. These products may also be utilized in some form or another by the tourism industry. However, tourism products are more often recognized in such business components as hotels, resorts, conventions, meetings, events, entertainment venues, attractions, amusement parks, shopping malls, music concerts, festivals, parks, restaurants, theaters, museums, history, heritage, culture, nature sites and more, as noted in Table 1.1. The tourism industry is a large, complex, and highly competitive sector of the economy at all levels: local, state/province, national, and international.

The full scope of domestic and international tourism, therefore, encompasses the inclusion of output of many different industries. The travel industries consume the output of feeder industries such as agriculture, fishing, food processing, brewing, construction, airports, transposition vehicles, communication equipment, and furniture, to name a few. In addition, tourist activities make use of the services of other industry items such as insurance, credit cards, advertising, database and niche marketing, the internet, social media, and e-commerce tools. In order to plan for and provide rational order to such a diverse and dynamic set of industries, it is necessary to develop policies and plans to assist decision-makers in the management of this complex phenomenon called tourism.⁷

Generally, the wealth of nations is measured almost entirely on the development and exportation of tangible goods (agriculture, livestock, mining and manufacturing), on the construction of infrastructure (highways, dams), and transportation (ocean vessels, trains, airplanes, buses, automobiles, and other vehicles that transport people and assets from place to place throughout the world). In the twenty-first century many nations are deep into the “services revolution” that is changing the way we live and the way we evaluate the world’s wealth. An ever-expanding world of innovation has already provided us with smart phones, e-commerce tools, digital cameras, high definition television, and satellite tech...