Sustainable Tourism Development Case Study

Words: 1419
Pages: 6

Chapter 1 – Introduction
1.1 Introduction
Tourism industry is amongst the faster growing sector in the world, as it frequently connected with an export industry (Naidoo, 2011). By now, that sector tale for 9.8% of global Gross Domestic Product and 284 million jobs. Due to that trend the tourism global GDP is expecting to rise by 4% per annum over the coming 10 years (World Travel & Tourism Council, 2016). Hence, small islands developing states like Mauritius benefits incredibly from tourism economic for developing its nation. But frequently these economic benefits are not fairly bear by the stakeholders as it associates with cultural and environmental costs for tourism development (Lisa Marie Assante, 2014). Therefore, there is an understanding

Indeed, the key concept of sustainable tourism development is to involve residents in tourism development. They are considered to be the main stakeholders in participating towards sustainable tourism development as they usually confront with tourism impacts in mainly rural areas.
According to Butler (2002), considering resident’s attitudes are demanding to adequately distributing social, environmental, economic costs and benefits of tourism for raising sustainable tourism development. Thus, rural residents of Mauritius must regard to make tourism development deeper sustainable that would result to the balance of natural resources within tourists and local community.
Typically, this research aims at assessing rural resident’s attitudes towards sustainable tourism development in Mauritius; whether rural residents is aware of that concept of community participation in decision making process towards tourism

Based on actual figure as per Statistics Mauritius, tourist arrivals have been increased by 9.9 % to range 586,464 in the 1st semester of 2016 compare to 533,781 in 2015 the same semester January to June(Statistics Mauritius, 2016). However, hotels, villas, apartments and other tourism developments have been taking place mostly in rural areas of Mauritius such as Tamarin, Flic en Flac, Chamarel, Bel-Ombre, Le Morne, Grand Baie, Trou aux Biches, Mont Choisy and Blue Bay. Subsequently, it has created countless disadvantages toward those resident’s such as augmentation in price of (land, water and energy), inflation, crime, social & cultural problems, noise pollution, traffic congestion, environmental damages, land and marine degradation. Consequently, the local residents of these areas have little to say about their role as actually tourists have the economic power to purchase “rights” and “service”(David L. Jones,