Factors Affecting Tourism

Nevertheless, tourism leads countries being westernized because it can attract firms to invest money in it such as opening franchise fast food shops and fashion stores. However, fast food stores usually sell food with plenty of oil and seasonings that harms our health and alters locals’ diet, therefore illnesses such as obesity, high blood pressure etc. occurs. Furthermore, depletion and diversion of resources such as water leaving less for the locals because large amount of water will be provided to hotels for swimming pools and golf courses. Consequently, shortage of clean water leads locals suffering from diarrhea and cholera.

In order to preserve their own culture, locals usually set up cultural villages or cultural stores to attract tourists. Yet, local carnivals are being commoditized because this is a good way to slow down or prevent the annexation of western culture such as aborigines performing traditional dances at cultural villages in Australia.

In my own judgment, I believe one of the most negative effects lead by tourism is the growth sex tourism. Women and children do want to finds jobs in urban areas because they can earn higher wages in urban areas relatively. Yet, as women and children are poorly educated in rural areas, they are unable to find proper jobs and end up being as a prostitute especially Bangkok. For example: after Goa was being discovered in 1960s by the hippies, scene of acid parties and raves increased, which lead the rising of woman and child prostitution. This enables them to have higher risk of obtaining AIDs and other sexual transmitted disease.

On the other hand, tourism can benefit country. As tourism can highly increase the income for the government, it can invest more money to improve the education system and enables the poor to receive formal education. In order to have better communication between locals and tourists, the government can encourage people to learn new languages or improve language standards in school. Prejudices can be reduced between the host and the tourists because we can understand each other’s culture by interaction.

Development of tourism can provide more job opportunities for women because women have stronger communication abilities compared to men, therefore they can work in hotels to answer customers’ enquires or apply jobs which requires very frequent communications between themselves and customers.

Increasing of income can also improve their infrastructure such as building higher quality roads, hospitals and providing better electricity and water to locals because they can invest more money to hire specialists to advice and guide workers to improve their infrastructure in better quality.

In conclusion, although tourism provides large amount of income to the country, in majority, tourism causes more negative impacts than positive impacts. Therefore, tourism may not be a good alternative for development.