Sustainable alternatives to insular mass tourism : recent theory and practice

Abstract

As one of history's oldest commercial enterprises, tourism has become the world's largest industry, surpassing both international oil and arms sales (WTTC, 1992). On the demand side, this prominence has been caused by postwar affluence and increased leisure in developed countries and a marked decline in the relative cost of travel. On the supply side, the mutually beneficial confluence of airlines, tour operators, travel agents and hotel chains in conjunction with receptive governments, particularly in less developed countries (LOCs), has produced a vast worldwide network of vacation opportunities. Such LOCs, including islands, have been especially eager to reap the foreign exchange, investment, income, and employment promises of tourism as they restructure away from traditional colonial monocrops. As a result, at the turn of the twenty-first century, tourism has become the industry of choice for modernizing small-island LOCs and, in large part, the tropical island holiday and/ or cruise has become the vacation of choice of conventional mass tourism.