Model for measuring carrying capacity in inhabited tourism destinations
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Model for measuring carrying capacity in inhabited tourism destinations Asunción Fernández-Villarán 1 Ana Goytia 1
& Nagore
Espinosa 2 & Marina Abad 3 &
Received: 26 December 2018 / Accepted: 29 January 2020/ # ISEG – Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão 2020
Abstract Sustainable development of tourist destinations, of any scale, such as countries, regions or municipalities, is hampered by the challenges that sustainability measurement faces. Although progress is being made in the measurement of tourism standards, such as IRTS 2008, by the UN and UNWTO, measurement of tourism at the subnational level still lacks international standards. In addition, measuring tourism sustainability means even more difficulties for tourism destinations, since standards have not yet been internationally agreed and resources and skills to develop them are scarce. To avoid or mitigate the excess of tourists, destinations that seek sustainable tourism development often include measures of tourism carrying capacity as part of their management processes. The methodology for measuring tourism carrying capacity of tourism resources, when seeking to obtain a maximum number of visitors that a destination can accept, is abundant. This is the case of those resources with clear entry and exit points. However, when an inhabited tourism destination wishes to avoid or mitigate the problems of tourism carrying capacity excess for the entire destination and not just of a tourism resource, from a management perspective and without pointing to a single figure, the literature on methodologies in this regard is scarce. This gap is addressed in this paper, as it proposes a methodology to measure tourism carrying capacity in inhabited tourism destinations through alerts that could help destination managers to act. Keywords Sustainability . Measuring tourism . Tourism carrying capacity
1 Introduction Tourism has potential to create employment and wealth for host territories. The former Secretary-General of the United Nations World Tourism Organization, Taleb Rifai (UNWTO 2017:1), has stated that “in addition to generating foreign exchange earnings * Asunción Fernández-Villarán [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
A. Fernández-Villarán et al.
and creating jobs, tourism promotes trade and investment and significantly contributes to development of other sectors of the economy —such as construction, manufacturing, retail and financial services.” Although tourism clearly holds important benefits, it also poses very significant dangers in terms of its impact and effect on the environment and on the local community. For example, growth in tourism businesses can lead to saturation in the use of a territory by existing services (transport, catering, public cleaning services, etc.) or to a reduction of services quality, which can directly impact into residents’ quality of life. For many years now, authors (UNWTO 1994; MMA 2003a, 2003b; Butler 1999; Ko 2005) are stressing the need to develop tools fo
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