Essay on Sustainable Tourism

Sustainable Tourism: The Importance of Destination Tourism Indictors

Question 1
(a) What is tourism destination’s life-cycle?
(b) List the seven destination lifecycle stages as identified by Butler (1980).

Introduction The tourism destination lifecycle describes the development of tourism resorts from their initial discovery to subsequent growth and eventual decline. The tourism destination lifecycle model provides a theoretical framework for understanding the development of tourist spots in addition to helping the industry to allocate resources at each stage in an appropriate manner.
Butler’s Model
The exploration stage where the tourist destination if relatively unknown to the public and there are few visitors to this destination. The involvement stage is where there is an increase in the number of tourists to the destination who also interact with the locals. The third stage is the development stage where the destination captures the attention of the public though the degree and the quality of the interactions between the tourists and the locals are on the wane (Butler, 1980, p.6).
The fourth stage is the consolidation stage where though the number of tourists visiting the destination is still increasing; the rate of such increase is showing a decline. The fifth stage is the stagnation stage where tourists perceive several problems with the destination as well as the economic benefit to the destination needs to be counterbalanced with the social and environmental impact. The sixth and the seventh stages relate to the rejuvenation as well as decline wherein destination either rebounds in its appeal or loses its charm to tourists (Butler, 1980, p.9).
Question 2
Discuss any five (5) core indicators of sustainable tourism as identified by the World Tourism Organization.

Five Core Indicators of Sustainable Tourism
The five core indicators among the list of eleven with regards to sustainable tourism, which are discussed here, are effects of tourism on local communities, tourism seasonality, energy management, economic benefits of tourism, and drinking water quality. The subsequent sections discuss each indicator along with its relevance to sustainable tourism, its measurement, and a key challenge that arise from implementing the indicator.
Effects of Tourism on Local Communities
To start with, the first indicator the effects of tourism on local communities encompasses the ratio of tourists to locals during the average and peak seasons, the percentage of those who believe that tourism has resulted in creation of better infrastructure, and the number and the capacity of social services available to the community (Schianetz & Kavanagh, 2008, p.602).
Tourism Seasonality
The next indicator is the tourism seasonality, which is all about how the inflow of tourists ebbs and rises with each season. This indicator is a good guide to understanding how the tourism sector has impacted the job creation in the local communities as it measures the ratio of the number of jobs created locally which are full time or part time. In other words, this indicator can help us understand whether the locals in a particular destination have benefited from tourism. The key challenge in this case relates to ensuring value creation in the lean season as well (Schianetz & Kavanagh, 2008, p.608).
Economic Benefits of Tourism The third indicator which is the economic benefits of tourism is a much more direct measurement of the value creation that has occurred in the destination because of tourism. This indicator measures the number of local people employed in tourism and the percentage of the revenues generated within the community against the total revenues from tourism. In other

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