MANAGING THE VISITOS AND THEIR IMPACTS
This chapter examines the practical ways in which visitors and visitor sites are managed by agencies and the tourism sector. It discusses the typical range of economic, social, cultural and environmental pressures that tourism exerts on the resource base on which it depends and the ways management tools may be used to develop a more sustainable resource base. On completion of this chapter, you should be able to understand:
● what the problems induced by visitor activity are
● how researchers approach the study of the economic, social, cultural and environmental impacts of tourism
● what visitor management is and the tools available to address visitor impacts in soft and hard ways
● the role of tourism planning, development and management in the case of Venice, which highlights the economic, social, cultural and environmental problems induced by tourism.
INTRODUCTION
Many of the previous chapters have examined how the members of the tourism industry manage and develop their businesses to produce a product or experience for a tourist. In this chapter the consequences of these actions in terms of tourist consumption are considered in relation to destination areas. This requires an understanding of the visitor as an agent of change in destinations due to the impacts induced directly or indirectly by their actions. Quite simply, it discusses where, why and how such impacts occur and with what effects. Promotion and advertising by the tourism sector (i.e. tour operators, NTOs and other promotional organizations) assist in generating tourism demand as a consumptive activity, which culminates in both positive and negative effects for the places it affects. These effects often co-exist, making policy-making, planning and management problematic owing to the tendency to create beneficial and undesirable impacts simultaneously. For this reason, this chapter will focus on some of the tools and approaches used in tourism studies to understand how tourism generates impacts, how these can be managed and the lessons that can be learned.
In any discussion of tourism’s impacts, three principal areas of concern exist: the economic effects of tourism; its social and cultural effects and, of course, the environmental dimension upon which the consumption of tourism experiences is often based. Since many of these impacts are site- or place-specific, it is useful to have some understanding of the geography of tourism to identify who goes where, when and why, and what impacts occur where.
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THE GEOGRAPHY OF TOURISM: ITS APPLICATION TO IMPACT ANALYSIS
Geography is about the study of the environment, people and the co-existence of man with the environment at different scales, ranging from the international through the national and regional to the local level. More advanced studies of tourism have shown that the contribution of geography can be significant, with its interest in place and space (i.e. how activities are organized in different locations) because tourism is an inherently dynamic activity that requires movement from an origin to destination area. Many studies of geography and tourism are highly academic and based on theory and concepts to understand the complexity of tourism in time and space (i.e. how it operates at different times and in different places). But there are certain research skills that geographers use, the application of which to tourism can help in understanding why tourists go on holiday to certain locations, when they go, what they do when there, where the impacts of such visitor activity occur and what can be done to minimize the effects. Figure 12.1is based on international data from the leading airlines which form part of the Association of Asia-Pacific Airlines (see Table 12.1 ). Using the data from their passenger volumes for 2006, it is possible to illustrate the scale and impact of visitor traffic on the airlines by region. Figure 12.1 shows that the majority of the airline’s traffic is generated as intra-regional traffic (i.e. traffic which is generated and travels within Asia – 88 million passengers carried, of which 11.2 million occurred within China, a rise of almost 2 million on 2004 –5 figures). This shows that 64 per cent of all the traffic occurs within Asia, and only 36 per cent is to other regions of the world. At a rudimentary level, Figure 12.1 begins to at least show the scale of tourist travel within Asia-Pacific, with significant flows to/ from the USA and Europe. As geographers look at the scale of travel, it is then possible for them to begin to understand more about the dynamics of tourist travel within a specific region, such as Europe, and the trends in the market, and then to consider these issues as a basis for understanding how tourism operates in the region.
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