What is Tourism?
Tourism is the activity undertaken by people to travel away from their homes for more than 24 hours. (Page and Connell,2009)
Another more complex definition of tourism is the activity of “persons travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes.”(Gee et al. 1997:5)
Tourism Society (1976) cited in Holloway et al (2009:8) states that “Tourism is the temporary short-term movement of people to destinations outside the places where they normally live and work, and activities during their stay at these destinations ; it includes movement for all purposes as well as day visits or excursions”.
What is the environment?
According to Page and Connell(2009:642) the environment is “the external conditions surrounding an object, form of life, or human activity.”
What are the impacts?
The impacts are the “effects, which may be either positive or negative, felt as a result of tourism-associated activity. Tourists have at least three kinds of impacts on a destination: economic, sociocultural and environmental. Tourism has effects on tourists, in terms of possible attitude and behaviour changes. “(Beech and Chadwick, 2006:556)
What are the impacts of tourism on the environment?
Basically the impacts of tourism on the environment are the impacts cause by tourism industry on the destinations where they operate their businesses .
According to Beech and Chadwich (2006:6)”the environmental impact of tourists is generally ‘bad’ “, because of the continuous arrival of tourists to different destinations it has a direct impact on the natural environment. There are different types of negative and positive impacts that tourism has on different destinations such as: environmental , economical and sociocultural impacts. (Beech and Chadwick,2006)
Under the environmental impacts there are two different categories : the negative and the positive impacts .
Page and Connell(2009) classifies the negative impacts into different categories, as follows:
1. Travel e.g Pollution – “Harmful effects on the environment as a by-product of tourism activity.”(Beech and Chadwick, 2006:558), (Page and Connell,2009)
2. Physical impacts – the harm done by constructing different products of tourism, tourist activities etc. (Page and Connell, 2009)
3.Activities related to tourism. (Page and Connell, 2009)
References:
Beech, J. and Chadwick, S. (2006), The business of tourism management, Essex: Pearson Education Limited.
Gee, C. Y , World Tourism Organization and Fayos-Sola, E. (1997), International Tourism: a global perspective, Spain: WTO.
Holloway, J. C. , Humphreys, C. and Davidson, R (2009), The business of tourism , 8th edition,Essex:Pearson Education Limited.
Page, S. J. and Connell, J. (2009), Tourism a modern synthesis, 3rd edition. Hampshire: Cengage Learning EMEA.