Local Perception of Impact-Attitudes-Actions towards Tourism Development in the Urlaubsregion Murtal in Austria

Abstract

Local residents are always the recipients of economic, environmental and socio-cultural impacts from tourism development. Residents' perceived impacts, attitudes towards tourism and the resultant supportive or opposing actions collectively affect the success of tourism, but are not thoroughly understood especially in small regions with rapid growth. The study investigated how the tourism impacts receive local perception, determine local attitudes and in turn lead to active or passive supportive action. The predisposition of linkage between attitude and behaviour is explored with the underlying aspects of impacts. Through the establishment of hypotheses of the relationship and an empirical survey-based study in Urlaubsregion Murtal (URM) in Austria, findings from local populations suggest that local attitude is significantly influenced by tourism impacts. In particular, socio-cultural impacts influenced attitude to a greater extent than the economic and environmental dimensions. The overall prevalent residents' attitude in the URM is highly positive as the respondents indicated a sense of openness towards tourism development and the vast majority agreed that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. A significant positive relationship between attitude and support is detected. However, the residents also intended to act more passively than actively to supporting tourism development, but the connection from attitude to specific active or passive actions is not apparent.

Cultural Routes in Kynouria of Arcadia: Geospatial Database Design and Software Development for Web Mapping of the Spatio-Historical Information

“…Peters, M., et al [9] and Psychogyios, D., et al [14] both agree-based on many previous studies-that such questions either raise new complex social problems or solve some preexisted problems. The fact is that cultural tourism is today recognized as one of the most important forms of tourist traffic in the world, and its popularity and importance are increasing.…”

“…Peters [9] mention that, no matter how many studies have been done on the subject of tourism of any kind, we are not yet in a position to speak with certainty about the acceptance or not of the local population in understanding the importance of cultural heritage and its exploitation. Human behavior is not easily measurable and depends on many factors, such as education and current social conditions [10].…”

“…In general, costs and benefits of tourism are categorized as economic, environmental, and socio-cultural; it often happens to decide on the use of cultural heritage, using a reasonable "win or lose" [10]. A key point described by [9,10] is that the impacts of those categories are closely linked. Greece has the advantage of a very rich cultural heritage and the disadvantage of having a destroyed economy, due to many war and slavery periods of the last two centuries, and due to political instability.…”

“…Who guarantees that noise, crime, and pollution will not be increased? Peters, M., et al [9] shows the results of a very interesting questionnaire related to our subject, and Guo, Y., et al [13] focuses on the local adaptive capacity and the community resilience, based on human psychology and some scenarios.…”

Local Concern for Sustainable Tourism Development: San Juan de Los Remedios, Cuba

“…The integration of sustainability principles in development strategies has received significant attention in recent years (Cavagnaro & Curiel, 2012), although it remains a challenge to engage commercial tourism interests in the creation of social and environmental values in the patrimonial tourist destination context to implement sustainability as an attribute of leadership (Postma, Cavagnaro, & Spruyt, 2017). It has been identified that one of the stronger motivations in tourism is the growing interest in the natural environment and cultural heritage at a local level (Salinas, et al, 2018;Mike, Chan, & Legerer, 2018); both of which establish an opportunity to promote sustainability through alternative tourism (Edgell & Swanson, 2013). Other authors agree that the "contemporary world is unsustainable, both socioeconomically and environmentally […] particularly in tourism" as "tourism represents an interesting challenge for sustainability, since it directly impacts and is impacted by both dimensions of sustainability" (Postma et al, 2017: p. 14), especially in patrimonial cities.…”