Sustainable Tourism Destination Development

Dear Colleagues,

In recent decades, sustainable tourism development has become a key prerequisite for tourism development in most destinations.

The UNWTO defines sustainable tourism as “tourism that takes full account of its current and future economic, social and environmental impacts, addressing the needs of visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities".

Although the definition of the UNWTO recognizes the complexity of the concept of sustainability and the fact that it concerns a multitude of stakeholders, it continues to embrace an obsolete vision regarding what matters most when pursuing sustainable development.

In fact, DMOs, such as Visit Flanders and the Dutch Bureau of Tourism, that possess a more modern vision of sustainability, consider visitors, the tourism industry, and the environment with regard to the wellbeing of the host communities. In other words, only when tourism development leads to, as Anna Pollock denotes, flourishing host communities, tourism development can be called sustainable.

Much therefore depends on the net impact tourism generates. This net impact should be positive and measured in terms of collective benefits and costs. Arguably, both under- and overtourism are forms of unsustainable tourism development. This also implies that sustainable tourism is linked to thresholds, or minimums and maximums. Moreover, it refers to the quality of visitors and of the tourism firms. More in general, rather than focusing purely on arrivals, bed nights and the economic impact, the simplistic systems with which tourism statistics are collected and presented need to be urgently overhauled.

Only along these lines can the dominating mass touristic business model, which clearly demonstrates how devastating unsustainable tourism development can be, be swapped for something more sustainable and tourism development policies be innovated so that they serve sustainability in a broad sense. Without forgetting, obviously, that tourism has been, still is, and will likely always be a powerful engine of social and economic progress.

The aim of the Special Issue is to gather important reflections that help to reconsider the idea of sustainable tourism development that is too often taken for granted, but of which the implications are not always fully understood or accepted.

Some relevant themes include the following:

• Sustainable tourism and novel ways to conceptualize it;
• Novel and more appropriate ways of measuring (un)sustainable tourism development;
• Sustainable tourism development in destinations of coastal, cultural, urban, or natural tourism;
• Impact analysis and sustainability of tourism;
• Undertourism as a form of unsustainable tourism development;
• Overtourism as a form of unsustainable tourism development;
• Sustainable business models in tourism;
• Modern tourism development strategies for sustainability of tourism;
• Tourism policies supporting sustainable tourism development.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Jan van der Borg
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.

• sustainable tourism development
• sustainable destination management
• sustainable tourism measurement
• undertourism
• overtourism