PLUS MINUS of TOURISM
Tourism is a dynamic and competitive industry that requires the ability to adapt constantly to customers’ changing needs and desires, as the customer’s satisfaction, safety and enjoyment are particularly the focus of tourism businesses.
Tourism has impacts, there are 3 main categories which are environmental impacts, social&culture impacts and financial or economic impacts.
1. Environmental Impacts
(Source: Shutterstock.com)
- Tourism puts enormous stress on local land use, and can lead to soil erosion, increased pollution, natural habitat loss, and more pressure on endangered species. These effects can gradually destroy the environmental resources on which tourism itself depends.
- Eco-tourism also has an active social dimension. It seeks to benefit local communities by giving them control over how the tourism develops, and by helping locals to use their lands and resources in more sustainable ways.
- Income from tourism may be used to help conserve the natural environment that is the reason why visitors come in the first place.
2. Social & Culture Impacts
(Source: newsroom.fb.com)
- Positive Impacts It is inevitable that tourism will have a major effect on the culture and society of an area. By promoting tourism you are encouraging contact between different cultures. Indeed many people deliberately choose to experience a culture very different to their own.
- Tourism may help to preserve local cultures and communities, as they become a tourist attraction.
- Local cultures could be devalued by tourism. They may almost become a freak show, where the visitors begin to look down on the locals as different.
3. Financial/Economic Impacts
(Source: consumerreports.org)
- Tourism provides employment for many local people, ranging from working in the hotels to selling trinkets on the beach. Without the tourist industry some less developed countries would have a much greater unemployment problem.
- The money that tourism brings in can be used to improve the infrastructure of the area. New roads, airports and facilities can be built, which cater for the increasing number of tourists, but also benefit the local residents.
- The jobs for the locals are often badly paid, with very poor working conditions.
Source:
- https://www.s-cool.co.uk/gcse/geography/tourism-and-resources/revise-it/the-impacts-of-tourism
- http://www.theworldcounts.com/counters/impact_of_transport_on_environment/negative_environmental_impacts_of_tourism
- http://www.theworldcounts.com/counters/impact_of_transport_on_environment/positive_environmental_impacts_of_tourism
- https://slideplayer.com/slide/9086530/