Tourism: costs and benefits
Geography · Key Stage 3 · The School
Why tourists go where they go
Tourists follow attractions: sun and beaches, mountains and snow, wildlife, history and culture. Cheaper flights and rising incomes in many countries mean more people can now travel further than ever before. A place with a genuine attraction and good transport links is likely to see tourism grow, whether or not it planned for it.
The benefits
Tourism creates jobs directly — hotels, guides, restaurants — and indirectly, in farming and building supplying those businesses. It brings foreign money into the local economy and can fund roads, airports and schools that would otherwise be unaffordable. For some countries, tourism is one of the largest sources of income of all.
The costs
Tourism can push up local prices, so residents compete with visitors for housing and food. Water can run short where a hotel uses as much as many local homes combined. Popular sites suffer litter, footpath erosion and pollution. Jobs in tourism are often seasonal and low-paid, and much of the profit can leave the country with foreign-owned hotel chains.
SUSTAINABLE TOURISM aims to keep the benefits while reducing the costs. Examples: limiting visitor numbers at fragile sites, employing and training local people rather than only flying in outside staff, keeping profits in the local economy through locally owned businesses, and protecting habitats the tourists came to see in the first place. None of this removes the costs completely. It is a genuine attempt to balance them, not a claim that tourism can be made cost-free.