Basics of tourism marketing

Sustainable On-site Tourist Behavior

• Middleton (1998) has identified ‘10Rs’ for environmental actions for the tourism industry as a whole.

Actions	Elaboration and example
Recycle	Either re-use for the same purpose or different purposes a line of products, e.g. recycle paper, cans, bottles and clothing
Re-engineer	Redesign or restructure behaviour through active personal intervention, e.g. specifying to guides that as a tourist you do not want to disturb wildlife but are happy to view from a distance
Retrain	Develop physical and personal skills to cope better in new situations, e.g. learning a few words of language to overcome basic difficulties, learning how to thank and appreciate the lives of those who are different
Reward	Take advantage of incentives or use one’s personal resources as an enticement to promote sustainable activities, e.g. becoming a donor or sponsor of organisations to support communities or the environment, tipping sustainable host behaviours, commenting favourably on effective management practices
Re-educate	Long-term changes to personal behaviour resulting from tourist experiences may help the overall sustainability effort, e.g.when they get home, tourists may stop their long-term use of plastic recently experienced as a hazard to marine tourism

Mechanisms Shaping On-site Tourist Behaviour

• Legal
• One potentially powerful mechanism for shaping unacceptable tourist behaviours lies in the use of the legal framework to prosecute offending individuals.
• Permits and passes
• Another kind of regulatory framework lies in the use of prohibitions, permits and passes to structure behaviour in zones and designated areas.
• Fees
• The public acceptability of fees and charges to access managed sites appears to vary from country to country and there are strong feelings about the issue.
• Social norms
• Social norms, effectively the reaction of others to public behaviour, can also shape sustainable on-site behaviour (example is smoking at closed doors)
• Infrastructure design
• The more environmentally deterministic approach to infrastructure design is to build and organise the setting so that negative tourist behaviours are difficult to perform.