While tourism can often be a huge benefit to locals of a destination, there are also a range of negative socio-cultural impacts inflicted upon a tourist destination, these include:
When planning tourism and attracting visitors to a region, it is essential that the negative socio-cultural impacts tourism are identified and that strategies are implemented to help to reduce such negative impacts.
References:
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. (1976). The Effects of Tourism on Socio-Cultural Values. Annals of Tourism Research. 4(2) p74-105.
Yildiz, S., Celik, P.A. & Ozcan, I. (2011) The Scale of Tourism’s Economic, Socio-Cultural and Environmnetal Effects on Local People: Developing Scale, Reliability and Validity Study. 2011 IEEE International Conference on Quality and Reliability. p230-234
- Tourists can be viewed by locals as intruders, moving in and taking away the best of the local resources. (Martyn, 1970, as cited in Hall, 2007). This can evoke a sense of distrust and disapproval towards the tourists and result in the tourist feeling unwelcome and uncomfortable.
- By marketing cultures, the marketing process can lead to the commoditisation of the culture (Hall, 2007).
- The demonstration effect. Often, tourist behaviour can lead to imitation by locals. Often this can lead to negative impacts as often the behaviour imitated by locals is of poor examples made by tourist.
- Conflict between tourists and locals. Because of the differences between the way of life for tourists and locals, conflict may arise as a result of the different opinions, backgrounds and attitudes.
When planning tourism and attracting visitors to a region, it is essential that the negative socio-cultural impacts tourism are identified and that strategies are implemented to help to reduce such negative impacts.
References:
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. (1976). The Effects of Tourism on Socio-Cultural Values. Annals of Tourism Research. 4(2) p74-105.
Yildiz, S., Celik, P.A. & Ozcan, I. (2011) The Scale of Tourism’s Economic, Socio-Cultural and Environmnetal Effects on Local People: Developing Scale, Reliability and Validity Study. 2011 IEEE International Conference on Quality and Reliability. p230-234