Sustainable Tourism: The Impacts of Tourism Development on Destination Communities

Dear Colleagues,

Tourism serves as a significant driver of economic growth, providing substantial revenues, employment opportunities, and investments to local destination communities. However, unplanned levels of tourism activity often lead to negative social, cultural, environmental, and psychological outcomes for destination communities, adversely affecting residents’ quality of life, health, and well-being. Current approaches to evaluating the impacts of tourism often overlook these negative consequences and rely solely on metrics associated with tourist volumes, revenues, and taxes. Therefore, there is a pressing need for a more holistic and comprehensive framework that assesses tourism’s impacts on resident communities across the social, economic, health, environmental, and psychological dimensions.

This Special Issue aims to contribute to current knowledge by conceptualizing, operationalizing, and analyzing the impacts of tourism, thereby shifting the focus of destination research and practice from merely increasing visitation numbers to enhancing the overall impacts of tourism on destination communities. Therefore, the Special Issue invites papers that explore the effects of tourism on destination communities, including residents’ quality of life, health, well-being, perceptions of the impacts of tourism, support for tourism development, etc., as well as their influence on tourism policy-making, planning, and destination governance. Research from different disciplines, perspectives, and methodologies is highly encouraged.

Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Social impacts of tourism;
• Cultural impacts of tourism;
• Environmental impacts of tourism;
• Economic impacts of tourism;
• Psychological impacts of tourism;
• Measuring the impacts of tourism;
• Residents’ quality of life, health, and well-being;
• Tourism development and destination communities;
• Destination community stakeholders;
• Residents’ perceptions of tourism impacts;
• Residents’ support for tourism development;
• Sustainable tourism policy.

Dr. Maksim Godovykh
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• tourism
• tourism impacts
• sustainable tourism
• destination management