Tourism can contribute to the vitality of communities in many ways. An example of this is festivals, fairs and local events, as these attract local resident’s which has been primary participants and spectators which are often revitalized and developed in response to tourist interest.
There are jobs created through tourism. These can act as a vital incentive to reduce emigration from rural areas. Local people can increase their influence on tourism development, as well as improve their job and earnings prospects, through tourism-related professional training and development of business and organizational skills.
Tourism supports the development of the community facilities and services that might not have been developed. This can bring higher living standards to a destination. These benefits can include upgraded health and transport improvements, and improvements such as public spaces, as well as influx of better quality commodities and food.
Tourism boosts the preservation and transmission of cultural and historical traditions. This often contributes to the maintenance and management of natural resources, the protection of local heritage and a renaissance of indigenous cultures, cultural arts and crafts.
Tourism also helps raise local awareness of the financial value of natural and cultural sites. This can encourage a feeling of pride in local and national heritage and interest in its conservation.
These points are positive impacts of tourism that can only arise when tourism is practised in a sustainable and suitable way. For the public to be involved is a necessity as a community involved in planning and functioning tourism has a more positive outcome and attitude. This proves as more supportive.
Although tourism can have a negative impact, it doesn't have to be harmful to local people and their traditions. Around the world, ecotourism has helped conserve local control over land use, encourage local pride in cultural heritage and enable many traditions to be preserved or resurrected.
For Example: The San of Namibia and southern Africa and the aboriginal peoples of Australia have recently regained management or ownership of traditional national park lands and conservancies, operating ecolodges and serving as guides and rangers while continuing their heritage.
Negative Impacts of Tourism Development.
Tourism can turn local cultures into commodities when religious rituals, traditional ethnic rites and festivals are reduced and sanitized to conform to tourist expectations, resulting in what has been called "reconstructed ethnicity."
Destinations risk standardization in the process of satisfying tourists' desires for familiar facilities. While landscape, accommodation, food and drinks, etc., must meet the tourists' desire for the new and unfamiliar, they must at the same time not be too new or strange because few tourists are actually looking for completely new things. Tourists often look for recognizable facilities in an unfamiliar environment, like well-known fast-food restaurants and hotel chains.
Because tourism involves movement of people to different locations, and establishment of social relations between people who would otherwise not meet, cultural clashes can take place as a result of differences in cultures, ethnic and religious groups, values and lifestyles, languages, and levels of prosperity.
The attitude of local residents towards tourism development may unfold through the stages of euphoria, where visitors are very welcome, through apathy, irritation and potentially antagonism, when anti-tourist attitudes begin growing among local people.
Socio-cultural impacts would be:
- Crowding in areas of overuse, which can adversely affect the overall visitor experience
- Displacement of local residents as development activities restrict their access to coastal resources
- Change in local customs as residents abandon traditional livelihoods for jobs that cater to the recreation and tourism industry
- Change in local culture as residents acquire practices observed of visitors
The physical influences that the increasing tourism flow, and its consequent developments, has on a destination can cause severe social stress as it impacts the local community.
