Balance between Hosts and Guests: The Key to Sustainable Tourism in a Heritage City

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is an interesting paper that has the potential to contribute and be of interest to the readership of this Sustainability Journal. However, there are some issues that it needs to address before it can be published;

1) I urge you to accentuate the gap found in the literature and explicitly talk about the theoretical and practical contribution of your paper in lieu of other existing literature. Authors have to improve the literature review. I couldn’t see any part of literature review in this article. It is needed a separate part in this article. Authors use outdated literature, and missing new references (using only 2 references from 2022). So references should be updated.

2) The subject of the article is quite interesting and updated.

Author Response

Thank you for your feedback. Taking into account your considerations, we have pointed out explicitly the gab in the research and the literature review:

“Thereby, a literature review of articles using this type of survey to analyze tourism within specific cities was conducted. Different studies were found where these surveys can be addressed to citizens (Biagi et al., 2020; Stylidis et al., 2014), tourists (Choi et al., 1999), or even other stakeholders such as the resource administration as detailed by Tsaur et al. (2006). However, there are no studies in the literature that evaluate the impact of the tourism considering a integrated perspective of the visitors and residents in the same study"

In addition, we have updated some references

Reviewer 2 Report

I am thankful to the editor for providing me an opportunity to review the article titled “ Balance between Hosts and Guests: the key to sustainable tourism in a heritage city.” My comments for the article are as follows;

The article is appropriately written, but I could not find a problem statement on which this article is based. Moreover, the authors should clearly define the objectives and research questions of the article. The study should prove its novelty by describing and comparing previous literature with this study. Proofreading of the paper is needed to remove language and editing issues properly.

Author Response

Thank you for your suggestion. We have We have better specified the main objectives of the article as well as highlighted the main novelty compared to other articles in the bibliography:

 “Thereby, A literature review of articles using this type of survey to analyze tourism within specific cities was conducted. Different studies were found where these surveys can be addressed to citizens (Biagi et al., 2020; Stylidis et al., 2014), tourists (Choi et al., 1999), or even other stakeholders such as the resource administration as detailed by Tsaur et al. (2006). However, there are no studies in the literature that evaluate the impact of the tourism considering an integrated perspective of the visitors and residents in the same study

For this reason, this article proposes a methodology to determine how tourism affects the way of life of the citizens of Santiago de Compostela (one of the most important touristic cities in Spain, which is the destination of the St. James Way), taking into consideration the perspective of both visitors and residents. Therefore, this article seeks an answer to these questions: Does tourism have any impact on Santiago de Compostela? What are the potential impacts of tourism on the city?”

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

First of all, many thanks for submitting your paper to this journal and for the time you spent writing that.

The purpose of present study is to analyze how tourism affects the life style of the citizens in Santiago de Compostela. There are some comments that will help you improve your research;

1. In abstract section; the type of research method and data collection tool should be mentioned.

2. This paper does not have a "literature review section" to explain the studies done on this topic.

3. In Line 96; the full name of UNESCO should be written, followed by the abbreviation.

4. Was the selection process of indicators mentioned in Table 1 (or the screening stage of the questions that could not be quantified) based on the opinion of the experts or the authors? This should be explained and if experts' opinions are used, the demographic characteristics of the experts should also be mentioned.

5. The caption of Table 1 is incorrect and should be edited.

6. In Line 153; the tables presented in the paper should be mentioned in the text. You can add Table S1 (not SM1) as an appendix at the end of the paper so that you can refer it.

7. Subsection 2-3; Scaling from 0 to 10 is based on which method or reference?

8. The caption of Figure 2 should be presented under a general title.

9. Where does Figure 3 come from? What is the basis of grouping indicators?

10. Equations 1 & 2 are based on which reference? It should be mentioned.

11. In Table 4, how are the categories, their number and their value selected? It needs to be clearly explained to the readers.

12. Please check the text carefully for grammatical errors to improve the readability.

Author Response

First of all, many thanks for submitting your paper to this journal and for the time you spent writing that. The purpose of present study is to analyze how tourism affects the lifestyle of the citizens in Santiago de Compostela. There are some comments that will help you improve your research.

1 In abstract section; the type of research method and data collection tool should be mentioned.

Thank you for your comment. We have specified the type of the research and data collection tool in the Abstract. Please see lines 21-23: “Hence, this methodology was based on create a set of indicators from surveys carried out among the three groups involved in the tourism sector: citizens, traders and visitors.”

2 This paper does not have a "literature review section" to explain the studies done on this topic.

Thank you for your suggestion. we have completed and explicitly pointed out the literature review: “Thereby, a literature review of articles using this type of survey to analyze tourism within specific cities was conducted. Different studies were found where these surveys can be addressed to citizens (Biagi et al., 2020; Stylidis et al., 2014), tourists (Choi et al., 1999), or even other stakeholders such as the resource administration as detailed by Tsaur et al. (2006). However, there are no studies in the literature that evaluate the impact of the tourism considering an integrated perspective of the visitors and residents in the same study.

3 In Line 96; the full name of UNESCO should be written, followed by the abbreviation.

Thank you for your appointment. The full name of UNESCO has been detailed.

4 Was the selection process of indicators mentioned in Table 1 (or the screening stage of the questions that could not be quantified) based on the opinion of the experts or the authors? This should be explained and if experts' opinions are used, the demographic characteristics of the experts should also be mentioned.

Thank you for your suggestion. The screening method was performed by the authors who were experts in different areas. This fact was pointed out in the manuscript:  “To carry out this screening, the opinion of different experts with backgrounds in various research areas such as environmental engineering, philology, biology and economics was taken into account.”

5 The caption of Table 1 is incorrect and should be edited.

Thank you for your appointment. 

6 In Line 153; the tables presented in the paper should be mentioned in the text. You can add Table S1 (not SM1) as an appendix at the end of the paper so that you can refer it.

Thank you for your suggestion. The authors have decided to present this type of tables in the Supplementary Material, so as not to exceed the amount of information in the manuscript.

7 Subsection 2-3; Scaling from 0 to 10 is based on which method or reference?

Thank you for your comment. The scaling method was performed taking into account the methodology for scaling qualitative data according to the reference: Guttman, L., 1944. A Basis for Scaling Qualitative Data. Am. Sociol. Assoc. 9, 139–150.

8 The caption of Figure 2 should be presented under a general title.

Thank you for the appointment. The title in Figure 2 has been changed.

9 Where does Figure 3 come from? What is the basis of grouping indicators?

Thank you for your comment. The indicators were aggregated considering the information which each indicators contain. For example, indicators that have personal information about respondents would be added to the group: Personal Characteristics: “and the information that each indicator contains”

10 Equations 1 & 2 are based on which reference? It should be mentioned.

Thank you for your suggestion. 

11 In Table 4, how are the categories, their number and their value selected? It needs to be clearly explained to the readers.

Thank you for your suggestion. We have pointed out in the manuscript from where the number of categories is given:  “The number of categories is given by the number of possible answers to the surveys”.

The scoring of each category was given in such a way that the highest scores are for those categories that favor more sustainable tourism: “It should be noted that the highest scores are given to categories that favor more sustainable tourism.” The values of each category were explained in section 2.3.1. “Categorization and scaling of indicators”.

12 Please check the text carefully for grammatical errors to improve the readability.

Thank you for your appointment. The text has been proofread by experts in the English language to correct possible grammatical errors

Reviewer 4 Report

This research proposes a set of indicators to assess sustainable tourism in cities, and if the reliability and validity of these indicators can be assured, the contribution to the field will be clear and undoubtful.

 

However, I have two main concerns,

 

1. the data for this set of indicators were obtained from some of the previous projects, but I did not see a description of the source of the sample. The authors should have given a clear description of demographic variables of the sample. For example, how many people give a response to the survey? What is the sex ratio of sample? How about the distribution of age? 

 

2. The authors did not conduct a solid reliability and validity test on their proposed indicator system, and the whole data results are descriptive. Since the data are derived from the survey, it is necessary for the authors to give some evidence to support the reliability and validity of the indicators.

 

In general, I appreciate the authors' attempt to assess sustainability by unifying citizens, visitors and traders, but the authors need to consider how they can demonstrate that their set of indicators is valid and reliable.

Author Response

This research proposes a set of indicators to assess sustainable tourism in cities, and if the reliability and validity of these indicators can be assured, the contribution to the field will be clear and undoubtful.

1 the data for this set of indicators were obtained from some of the previous projects, but I did not see a description of the source of the sample. The authors should have given a clear description of demographic variables of the sample. For example, how many people give a response to the survey? What is the sex ratio of sample? How about the distribution of age?

Thank you for the suggestion. The authors have added some information about the respondents: “The number of people surveyed was 929 citizens, 46% of whom were men and 54% women, with approximately 60% between the ages of 30 and 64. In the case of visitors, 2081 people were interviewed, of which 56% were women and 44% were men, and 64% were between 30 and 64 years of age. With respect to the traders, data on sex and age were not considered, and a total of 410 people were interviewed”

2 The authors did not conduct a solid reliability and validity test on their proposed indicator system, and the whole data results are descriptive. Since the data are derived from the survey, it is necessary for the authors to give some evidence to support the reliability and validity of the indicators.

In general, I appreciate the authors' attempt to assess sustainability by unifying citizens, visitors and traders, but the authors need to consider how they can demonstrate that their set of indicators is valid and reliable.

Thank you very much for your comment. The authors have done a thorough job of data collection to create a meaningful sample that reflects the reality of tourism in the city. The results obtained coincide with the vision of the citizens of the city, due to the fact that the indicators and the answers to the surveys were carried out by the population groups involved. One way to validate this set of indicators proposed by this study could be the application of this same set on another city, as the authors finally indicated in the conclusions section

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

Thanks for resubmitting the revised version of your paper.

In Lines 22-23 : please write the sentence more fluently to increase readability. "this methodology was based on create a set of indicators from surveys carried out among the three groups involved in the tourism sector: citizens, traders and visitors".

--

Best wishes,

Author Response

Thank you for your comment. The sentence has been rewritten as follows:

"This work aims to define a set of environmental and socio-economic indicators in order to assess the impact of tourism activity. To this end, surveys were carried out among the three groups involved in the tourism sector: citizens, traders and visitors"

Reviewer 4 Report

My only concern is whether the indicators are valid and reliable.

Author Response

Thank you for your comment. I understand that the work that has been done in co-operation with experts requires a consensus on the selection of indicators. In particular, the number of indicators is large and the aim is to obtain a complete picture of the impact of tourism. Some of them are listed in references included in the manuscript. It is not only important to highlight the interest of the tourist site as well as the services offered to visitors, but also the profile of the visitors and how their interaction with the city's inhabitants, local commerce and the service sector is evidenced.