Tourism industry is growing from year to year. According to World Tourism Organization statistics (2012), despite the global economic downturn the international tourist arrivals grew by 4.6 percent in 2011 comparing with 2010. Though the growth is not evenly distributed across all regions, the overall trend shows that in the long terms perspective the tourism industry will continue growing and number of tourists will only be increasing. This positive trend can be also expanded to the domestic touristic flows.
Taking into account that tourism can (and will if uncontrolled) impact the natural environment of the tourist attraction, those growing figures imply growing pressure on the state of nature at travel destinations. Moreover, not only natural tourist attractions are endangered, many historic sites also require principles of sustainability to be integrated into the site management. Otherwise, a typical tourist desire to “take home a piece of history” may result in serious damage to any tourist attraction.
Tourism is majorly a business. Practically, any type of tourism implies at least some commercialization. Therefore, in order to make tourism sustainable it is important to make sustainability attractive in business terms, i.e. to make sustainable tourism a competitive advantage. If sustainability will become a source of financial loss, the unsustainable (more profitable) practices will thrive. This paper will also show that implementation of the principles sustainable tourism can make tourism businesses more competitive and profitable. At the same time, since sustainable tourist attractions, in general, represent public goods, creating a framework in which sustainable practices will be more profitable is a task for public policy.
Variations of Tourism
Prior to discussing the implications and effectiveness of sustainable tourism it is important to understand what sustainable tourism means and other types of tourism. Literature review shows that there are various types of tourism that are acknowledged by different experts. In fact, each particular author has its own categorization and definitions of the tourism. However, all definitions still contain similar terms though with specific peculiarities.
Weber (2006, 10-11) quite simply defines sustainable tourism as incorporation of sustainability principles into the tourism industry. In other words, Weber states that tourism is sustainable, if it does not negatively affect the opportunity of future generations to use or visit respective touristic attractions in future. Such definition still leaves some space for discussion. Indeed, it should be acknowledged that this definition measures the state of the environment in terms of its value to humans. Future generations of humans may still enjoy the natural beauty of a particular forest and be completely unaware that an endemic to this forest species of timid birds was extinct due to decreased habitat.
At the same time, it should be assumed that nowadays very few places on the Earth (if any) can be considered as unreachable for a tourist. Even one tourist visit of the natural site can have very negative indirect consequences for the environment which means that it is extremely difficult to assess all possible impacts of the tourism (Poser 2011). In other words, in this …