Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
2
The Impacts of Transport
for Tourism
Slow travel, like other forms of tourism, has an impact on transitory routes
and destinations. The extent to which positive impacts can be nurtured and
negative impacts minimized is the major issue for tourism planners seeking to
achieve sustainable development. As with other forms of tourism, evaluation
of such impacts, and especially the transport element, is crucial in a wider
context of the destination planning process and in terms of ecological foot-
print analysis (for a fuller explanation, see Peeters and Schouten, 2006;
Wackernagel and Rees, 1996).
The traditional approach to tourism development, as discussed in the
literature for the past three decades, has been grounded on the assumption
that tourism delivers economic gain (Lea, 1988; Lee and Chang, 2008). In the
context of developing countries this approach is now aligned to sustainable
tourism, although researchers are increasingly reporting that the trade-off
between the socio-economic impacts and economic delivery is complex
(Tosun, 2001). Thus, the extent to which direct economic gains from tourism
development outweigh, or are outweighed by, social and environmental costs
is rarely assessed in the round.
The positive benefits that tourism delivers, and the efficacy of different
development approaches, have been the subject of discussion by several
authors (Chok et al, 2007; Gössling, Hall and Lane, 2008; Hall, 2007b;
Nawijn et al, 2008; Scheyvens, 2009) and there are undeniably a range of
associated negative impacts (Hall and Page, 2006; Sharpley, 2009). This chap-
ter aims to present a more nuanced understanding of tourism impacts and a
critique of the common view of tourism as a relatively benign service sector.
In reality, tourism makes a significant contribution to climate change at the
global level and this has been consistently ignored in destination-based impact
analyses (Hunter, 2002).
The analysis refers to tourism impact studies that explore the triple
bottom line framework of economic, socio-cultural and environmental
