Sustainable Mass Tourism: Fantasy or Reality?

Abstract

For the last decade, there has been a debate on how to achieve a more sustainable mass tourism. Mass tourism has been, and still is, considered to be a bad type of tourism and must be further developed to become more sustainable. Previous research has focused on defining the concept of sustainable development but without any success, there are still over 70 different interpretations. The purpose is to discuss and analyze the concept of sustainable mass tourism from a conceptual perspective. The implication of the paper is that sustainable mass tourism, as a concept, must be discussed from a new perspective which divides and studies the three different aspects of sustainable mass tourism (e.g. economic sustainability, social sustainability and environmental sustainability) separately. Sustainable mass tourism is today only an ideology which cannot be successfully implemented in the tourism industry. By dividing the concept into three different parts, it might become more transformable and useable for mass tourism producers. © Common Ground, Anna Sorensson, All Rights Reserved, Permissions.