The Importance Of Sustainable Tourism

Register to read the introduction… Satisfied guests come back and do word-of-mouth advertising. This leads to a higher average infrastructure utilisation and at the same time leads to reduced advertising costs. Wehrli et al. (2011) stated that Lucerne gets over a million overnight tourists every year not counting the number of tourists who just stop by the city during the day. This staggering number can only take place if the visitors kept coming back to the city as the numbers do not at all imply that these million visitors perform their journey once to never come back. The WTO (2004) lists a number of factors influencing guest satisfaction, e.g. meeting tourists‘ expectations, providing a sense of good value for money, ensuring a clean, safe and secure environment, hospitality, quality of sites, events, attractions and services related to them, expectations and interests. However, many individual responses depend on personal interests and individual perceptions and are not objectively measurable indicators: e.g. did the skier obtain his preferred, snow conditions, was the local festival interesting to the visitor, was the food to the taste of the tourist? However, it can be determined that overall Lucerne manages to meet the multitude and varied desires and expectations that people have coming into the city with a sufficient and more than satisfactory response. Lucerne is also noted for its familiarity and lack of drastic changes, both of which encourages the sort of idyllic environment that attracts repeat visitors. In fact, the city of Lucerne goes so far as to avoid major touristic events or greatly disruptive touristic activities – both of them which could have generated considerable income in the short run – in order to avoid the dissemination of negative images or lead to the crowding out of regular guests, as the overall effect of such activities may be rather negative and ambiguous. Traffic Environment Uniquely in Lucerne, bikes, slow public railways and even walking is heavily promoted by the local populace. This is a result not only the small nature of the town which doesn’t allow for motor vehicles or heavy transport to occur, but it also is located within the nearby regions of Zurich and Bern which eliminates the need for air travel. By looking at the mobility development in the past years and decades, one observes a substantial increase in most countries (e.g. for Switzerland see Bundesamt für Statistik 2009). In addition, there is no evidence suggesting a trend reversal. In industrialised countries, holiday and leisure traffic is predominant; e.g. in Switzerland it accounts for 45%, in Austria for 41% and 92% on weekdays and weekends respectively. Mobility or traffic is directly linked to ecological aspects since – independent of the journey type – in tourism most energy is used for transport purposes. The following figures clearly illustrate the great importance of the issue of transport for sustainable tourism. 60 to 95 % of the environmental impact of leisure-tourism is due to transport (SNV, 2009). Up to 40% of CO2 emissions in tourism is caused by air transport, 35% by other traffic modes and 21% by accommodation; the share of other activities is only 4% (Aldwarth, 2010). …show more content…
Frommer (2012) cites that it was during this era that Lucerne has managed to establish a balance between the established culture which existed at that time and is very attractive to conventional tourists who seek to engage in authentic traditional culture along with alternative culture which is more attuned by younger, hip tourists who seek adventure and a glimpse of something different. This consensus or balance that has been reached has inspired a new Swedish term that is called Kulturkompromiss – otherwise known as culture …show more content…
In fact, McKercher and Du Cros state that in many places, cultural heritage management and the torusim industry are often at odds with on another, and in fact, remarkably little dialogue occurs between the two even though they both share mutual interests in the ‘management, conservation and presentation of the culture and heritage assets’. Richards (2007) further supports this thesis by stating that places where there is a functioning culture heritage management and a booming tourist sector as can be in Lucerne, the two will tend to complement one another rather than choose to isolate the other and thus result in poor consumer experiences and diminish the value of cultural