Socio-Cultural Impact of Tourism
1. Introduction
Nowadays the level of awareness is quite high that tourism has a general impact on the destination. Many times it is talked about the economical impact which is mainly considered positive as it creates jobs in that area and brings people to the destination that spend money there etc. The environmental impact is a popular topic as well that is covered continuously in the news mainly by claiming the airplanes for their carbon emissions but also stating the destroying impact of mass tourism because of littering, over visitation of natural sights etc. Due to this many tourism dedicate their CSR programmes mainly to this issue as it is the best known.
However, tourism also has another impact, namely the socio-cultural. This means that social structures, the culture and traditions can be influenced, changed or even completely substituted due to tourism. This can be mainly noticed by the local communities themselves and is less obvious for the tourists. Nevertheless, this does not mean that this impact is less strong or less negative than the ones mentioned before. It just gets less media presence. This was proved once more during my research as it was very hard and it took a long time to find proper material while economic and environmental issues constantly popped up.
With my essay I want to show that the socio-cultural impact of tourism is an important topic which definitely deserves more attention. I also want to make clear that this is nothing that just happened in the passed but instead is current as the communities have to live on with the consequences of the impact and every new discovered destination will face the same challenges.
In order to reach my goal I will use destinations from three different continents describing how they have individually experienced the socio-cultural impact of tourism and the consequences mentioning the positive and the negative aspects. This will be Lumbini a destination located in Nepal, two villages
Nowadays the level of awareness is quite high that tourism has a general impact on the destination. Many times it is talked about the economical impact which is mainly considered positive as it creates jobs in that area and brings people to the destination that spend money there etc. The environmental impact is a popular topic as well that is covered continuously in the news mainly by claiming the airplanes for their carbon emissions but also stating the destroying impact of mass tourism because of littering, over visitation of natural sights etc. Due to this many tourism dedicate their CSR programmes mainly to this issue as it is the best known.
However, tourism also has another impact, namely the socio-cultural. This means that social structures, the culture and traditions can be influenced, changed or even completely substituted due to tourism. This can be mainly noticed by the local communities themselves and is less obvious for the tourists. Nevertheless, this does not mean that this impact is less strong or less negative than the ones mentioned before. It just gets less media presence. This was proved once more during my research as it was very hard and it took a long time to find proper material while economic and environmental issues constantly popped up.
With my essay I want to show that the socio-cultural impact of tourism is an important topic which definitely deserves more attention. I also want to make clear that this is nothing that just happened in the passed but instead is current as the communities have to live on with the consequences of the impact and every new discovered destination will face the same challenges.
In order to reach my goal I will use destinations from three different continents describing how they have individually experienced the socio-cultural impact of tourism and the consequences mentioning the positive and the negative aspects. This will be Lumbini a destination located in Nepal, two villages