Sustainable tourism: Gen Z?

Abstract

Tourism is a system that has social, environmental and economic impacts on a global scale. A system of this size has inevitable consequences. These results, which become a chronic problem especially in the balance of environmental conservation and economic outputs, need to be evaluated from different perspectives. At this point, sustainable tourism is an important approach. Economic gain, balanced resource consumption and consideration of future generations are the core of this approach. The focus of sustainable tourism, which has conceptually different definitions, is concept of generation. Therefore, it is important to reinterpret sustainable tourism in the context of today's generations. Today's young people, called Generation Z (Gen Z), have quite different characteristics from previous generations. As natives of the digital world Gen Z’ers, born and growing in a period of economic crises, wars and environmental problems. This generation is innovative and has a strong communication network. In addition, this new generation, which uses technology extensively and easily accesses information, is an interesting subject of investigation for the applicability of the concept of sustainable tourism. In this study, the diverging and adaptive aspects of the concepts of sustainable tourism and Gen Z are examined and various inferences have been made in the context of today's world.