Managing Sustainability
Measuring the Impact of Green Management in Marinas on Yachtsmen´s Satisfaction and Expenditure
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yen E. Lam Gonzalez, Yen E. Lam Gonzalez
The yachting tourism industry is believed to have sufficient social and environmental significance to justify academic attention. This paper studies the impact of responsible environmental care in marinas on yachtsmen´s individual expenditure and satisfaction with nautical installations. In this regard, a theoretical model of structural equations is proposed and empirically estimated, using data collected from 402 sailors mooring their vessels in nine different ports of call of diverse destinations across the Atlantic. The study confirms that sailors' impressions and opinions about the environmental management of marinas has the largest potential to impact their satisfaction with the port and is the only factor with direct and positive influence on their expenditure during the call. This demonstrates that there exists a significant environmental awareness among port users and a need to warrant that their activity generates a positive impact on those places they visit. Consequently, industry and destinations need to adopt a more responsible position, with clean and green technologies and solutions for the nautical environment, to ensure higher satisfaction levels and economic impact. Findings further contribute to the scarce academic literature of this area and provide the opportunity for developing recommendations for nautical destinations managers and policy-makers, in relation to the design of more efficient incentives for the industry, to promote the adoption of eco-friendly strategies. Finally, this research allows a better understanding of the importance of the mitigation and adaptation to climate change, in an attempt to contribute to the wellbeing of future generations.
Air Pollution and Tourism Demand: A Case Study of Beijing, China
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Xiaoge Zhou, Yolanda Santana Jiménez, Juan M. Hernández, Jorge Vicente Pérez Rodríguez
Study on environmental impacts of tourism industry has long been a research focus under the background of promoting a more sustainable tourism growth. However, empirical study on the impact of air pollution on tourism has been relatively limited, especially for developing countries where tourism has been growing rapidly due to economic growth and facing an increasingly challenging air pollution issue. China’s tourism industry has witnessed a steady growth largely due to the nation’s steady economic growth and opening-up policy ever since 1980s, and has continued its rapid growth pace despite of a slowing-down economic growth in the last few years. Meanwhile, a worsening environmental pollution, the heavy smog, has become a threatening issue for sustainable tourism growth in heavily polluted regions such as the capital city, Beijing. As some media have reported, the smog is “choking China’s inbound tourism and “creating a tide of smog refugees. But existing research has mainly focused on impact of air pollution on inbound tourism, while its impact on the domestic tourism has been relatively neglected. Taking Beijing as the study case, this paper assesses the interrelationship between air pollution and domestic tourist arrivals from 31 mainland Chinese provinces and municipal cites based on panel data analysis. For this purpose, a gravity model has been applied incorporating air quality variables into the tourism demand model. Results show evidence in favor of the existence of relationship between air pollution and tourism growth.
Individual and Community-level Impacts and Effects of Tourism by Systematic Review of the Resident Attitude Research
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tina Segota
This paper summarizes an extensive literature review addressing the question, in which way the impacts and effects of tourism development have been both conceptualized and measured vis-à-vis the distinction between individuals and communities? It considers both conceptualisation and construction of the existing theoretical/empirical models of resident attitudes towards tourism published from 1990 to 2015. The discussion of findings is structured through perceptions of tourism impacts, and their antecedent and dependent variables. To stimulate future research and debate, this paper suggests rethinking resident reactions to tourism in terms of perceived tourism impacts that affect residents directly at an individual level vs. indirectly at a community level.
