174 Practice
form of an escape from northern or southern chills and picking up some sunshine
while crashing out with relatives in southern or northern suburbia, which,
although lacking in fiscal intensity, is bone fide tourism activity.
The challenge to tourism planning is to fit supply side provisioning and
profit-taking to the demand side challenge; achieving customer satisfaction,
and the avoidance of host community irritation, ensuring that the cultural
environment is left unadulterated and the natural environment
unimpaired. A wider objective is to implicate indirect beneficiar-
ies (the general public) in an experience which is profitable to all.
In the best outcome circumstance the customer obtains value for
money and furnishes the provider with profits, while also enrich-
ing the cultural heritage both ways and improving levels of local
access and visitor enjoyment.
Enrichment of the cultural base for a receiving culture arises as a consequence
of cross-cultural sharing and mixing – a both-ways shared exchange.^36 Conserva-
tion and enhancement of the natural resource base can arise from the installation
of an improved infrastructure, landscape restoration, and the protection of flora
and fauna.Tourism encounters within the tourism-as-industry context are
elective encounters. Tourism needs to be understood as a take-it-
or-leave-it industry which can, and ought to be, subject to deft
quota control by the owner-stakeholders. The extent to which the
general population is predisposed or ill-disposed to accept and
participate in the tourism encounter is a matter of contact concern
to the visitor as consumer. The aspirations and attitudes of the
‘hosts’ can be manipulated, channelled, and factored in. The
number of tourists (tourist-stay units) is the quantifiable element
in the equation, giving rise to socio-cultural differences to recon-
cile and physical impacts to ameliorate. And it is because of these
needs for amelioration and mitigation that attention needs to be
focused upon absorptive criteria, the retention of intrinsic socio-
cultural host worth, preservation of the cultural heritage, and con-
servation of the environment.
The ‘absorptive’ factor is significant in sparsely populated
regions offering high levels of scenic attraction, where the
amount of tax-bearing land is probably low. In this circumstance
private-sector providers do well; but the infrastructure providers (local govern-
ment and tourism agency) face funding difficulties. This leads inevitably to poor
road maintenance, failed infrastructure, and serious mishaps. In this context
tourism enablement has to be centrally assisted to avoid claims for damage against
utility providers. At base the first need is for a sound estimation of demand,
backed up with eithera control on visitor numbers orthe provision of amenities
and utilities funding sufficient to keep ahead of that demand and meet the cost
of mitigating visitor damage.Relative to high-volume
mass-yield tourism,
consultTourism: Principles,
Practices, Philosophies.
Goeldner and Ritchie,
2002.SUBTLE MECHANICS
During the late 1960s–
early 1970s the long-stay
presence of cash-
strapped, ‘flower power’
visitors to Nepal led the
government to accept
‘team’ recommendations
to hugely increase the
cost of visitor visas, limit
free movement to the
Vale of Katmandu, and
for government to own a
large part of the hotel
and the air transport
services. The upshot for
that decade: effective
control of both tourist
numbers, quality and
profits.