In this exclusive article for Traveltalk, Associate Professor GLEN CROY, Director of Engagement in the Department of Management, Monash Business School (pictured below), looks at the problem and offers an interesting solution.
While some of us are lucky enough to be a tourist, almost all of us live in communities that are visited by tourists.
For some communities, the tourist levels are so high that normal life is vastly disrupted.
Excessive tourism is putting pressure on public services, harming natural resources and driving up house prices.
Residents of tourist-filled communities are calling on local authorities to cap visitors, ban private jets and diversify their economies to be less reliant on tourism.
As tourism’s negative impacts grow in the places we live, there’s a need for tourism planners and managers to intervene. We deserve a community-centric approach to tourism planning and management.
There are three broad approaches to address the question: who is tourism for?
The first is the tourist-centric approach. This is the ‘Disneyland Model’, in which we aim to maximise the tourists’ experience.
Here, by tourists having personalised novel experiences and hence satisfied, they are willing to pay more.
Behind the scenes everything is planned and managed to provide the perception of spontaneous excitement and wonder, from the [Buena] vista, the interactions with the ‘locals’, and the always happy to help response, no matter the [inappropriate] request.
This approach can be very profitable, though tourism, in this case, is to benefit the tourist.
The community often needs to be excluded to manage this experience. Indeed, for Disneyland, there are reports that their staff cannot even afford to live in the surrounding locations, instead living in cars.
Can this tourist-centric approach be transferred beyond theme parks? Yes. You might even experience this yourself. These areas might be characterised by ‘authentic’ restaurants with multi-language menus and options for fries with anything, souvenir shops and high-end retail, increasingly characterising the main piazza, plaça, plaza, praça, or platz in European cities.
As a local, these are areas, in the centre of your community, where you feel excluded; these are now sacrificed to tourists and their experiences.
This exclusion can also be more than just perceived. A recent example from Santorini where they requested residents to stay at home to allow tourists more space!
The second is the tourism-centric approach. Here, the goal is to maximise outcomes for enterprise, which is largely based upon scale, such as landings and berths, and increasing these is a positive KPI.
As such, the airport looks to have more planes, the port looks to have more ships, without necessarily considering where all these tourists are going to go.
The hotels reach capacity and the enterprising opportunity is short-term rentals (low-cost to switch, high-return compared to current use).
Further government infrastructure investment is requested, with use-based business cases, for larger roads, more runways, a bigger port… which increases the scale of tourism likely managed by international businesses.
In this approach, the community is again excluded due to the scale of tourist numbers and the competition for everything.
Barcelona is a common case of a community exceeding its capacity and where, just since the turn of the century, cruise ship passengers have increased by nearly 3m and airport passengers by 30.5m, while the number of hotel beds only grew by 45,730 (https://www.statista.com/).
The increased number of tourists have been absorbed in other ways, which has displaced the locals.
The focus on tourists and tourism has riled communities to act, from graffiti instructing tourists to go home (or worse), to protesting and even shooting tourists with water pistols.
As indicated, without action to better manage tourism, communities are increasingly taking it upon themselves to intervene and demonstrate when capacity has been reached.
The third approach, a community-centric one, might be the answer of who tourism is for – developing the community through tourism.
In this third approach, there is still a desire for tourists to have satisfying experiences and for enterprises to be profitable, however, this is for and within the limits of community benefits.
We have proposed three principles guiding the community-centric approach: community involvement, community power and control, and community outcomes.
- Involvement is an active attitudinal and psychological term, which also includes engagement; more than just taking part.
- Power and control is community-based, compared to being with external actors.
- Outcomes are the achievement of internal, community development outcomes as distinct from external outcomes.
Inherent in this approach are community-set boundaries and outcomes, borrowing from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics model. Of note, this planning is for the community and their future, rather than just tourism.
With the understanding of what different futures might be, the community identifies their core outcome goals, which become the ‘doughnut’ measures.
These set minimum and maximum levels within which the community meets their needs without undermining current or future capacity to deliver on their goals.
For the community-centric approach, the community needs to have informed consent about the consequences and opportunities [and opportunity-costs] in different future scenarios.
For tourism, we have a great understanding of how it will develop and the consequences at different stages.
Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s there were models describing the consequences to changes in tourism and how these effect the location, tourist types and community responses.
With knowledge of the limits, tourism can be planned and managed to stay within the boundaries. Of course, as per the principles, it is crucial that the community is continually involved, has power and control, and is benefiting from the outcomes.
In Australia, there are examples of the community-centric approach, such as Flinders Island where, through a facilitated process, the community determines what tourism should look like and are kept involved through the management process.
We have found that tourists are aware of tourism’s negative impacts and generally want to avoid them. Though often they do not think they are as bad as other tourists and are less aware of the cumulative effects.
The call for those responsible for tourism planning and management is to involve the community and work to achieve their outcome goals, within their limits.
For tourism enterprises, recognising many are embedded within their communities, providing multiple benefits, and some involve the community in their goal setting, managers should reflect on how the business and their tourists contribute to the community, and where this could be strengthened.
