Its is necessary to take a closer look at environmental impacts when deciding on the future security of the tourism industry. When considering environmental impacts it is important to not only look at air-pollution related to the use of facilities, and damage to vegetation and wildlife, but also at infrastructure and eco-tourism.
Eco-tourism is a type of nature-based fast growing tourism, which is argued to not be practiced enough globally, which is meant to be less damaging to the destinations cultural,social and especially environmental conditions by trying to create global awareness and contribute towards the destinations resources, as supposed to how mass tourism would. However people argue that eco-tourism can have the opposite affect as its involvement in protected ecological environments can be damaging rather than beneficial as it can act as a stressor and induce major economical changes. Tourist activities can lead to various damaging factors creating impact on wild life resources, water and vegetation, going in protected areas with different transport vehicles can lead to erosion by wind and waters, and soil damage and disturbance. Tourism could result in the threat of approaching human health and water quality.
However the fact that eco-tourism is rapidly growing is resulting in more environmental impact research and global awareness. Different monitoring programmes are attempting to observe and discover the negative impacts related to eco-tourism.
Some, however, see eco-tourism as a mass marketing scam aimed at environment conscious tourists, as some tourist destinations have used it to attract more tourists rather than supporting environmental and economic and social conditions, which misses the main concept of eco-tourism altogether.
Other factors that can affect the tourism industry dramatically are economic factors. Without taking the past recession into account it is made quite clear that tourism will always be, and always has been, an economically unstable,not to mention unpredictable, industry. First of all tourist demand is seasonal which could lead to major losses in specific destinations when not in peak season, which therefore leads to unstable employment for many, especially as sadly no destination can fully rely on tourism, there will always be changes in foreign currency exchange rates, there is even the possibility of recession and political unrest in certain places or unusual climatic events can cause tourists to want to explore different tourist destinations.
Creating customer loyalty is rather difficult as tourists tend to want to travel to a variety of different locations.
Sources:
'Tourism: economic, physical and social impacts', Alister Mathieson and Geoffrey Wall.
'Tourist Development', Douglas Pierce
'The impact of tourism on the environment', Organisation For Economic Co-operation And Development
'Contemporary tourism: an international approach', Chris Cooper and C. Michael Hall
'Tourism, Recreation And Sustainability', Stephen F. McCool and R.Neil Moisey
