Sustainable Tourism
Sustainable is the concept of visiting a place as a tourist and trying to make only a positive impact on the environment, society and economy. A key aspect is respect for the people who call the location home, the culture and customs of the area, and the socio-economic system. While sustainable tourism is sometimes confused with ecotourism, ecotourism is actually only one aspect of sustainable tourism.
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Thailand has been fortunate to benefit from exponential tourist growth. Visitors entering the country have doubled each successive decade since the 70s and now numbers more than 15 million people every year. This is a huge benefit to the Thai economy, bringing in more than $15 billion a year. Not unique to Thailand, the concept of more sustainable tourism has been gaining momentum for years, driven by an increased awareness among tourists of their impact on the environments and societies that they visit and their corresponding willingness to seek out and pay a premium to reduce their footprints.
The ramifications of this shifting preference are already spreading across the tourism and hospitality sectors worldwide, as operators make greater efforts to provide services demanded by their clientele.
Advantages of Tourism
Now-a-days, tourism is the flourishing industry. The advantages of tourism includes employment opportunity, growth of service sector, foreign exchange earnings, opportunity for recreation, economic growth, cultural exchange, better international relations, enjoyment, better health and wellness.
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1. Employment: Tourism provides employment opportunity for local people. Tourism industry is growing very rapidly in India employing millions of people.
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2. Growth of Service Sector: Services sector engaged in tourism sector get the most out of tourism sector. A large number of businesses engaged in service sector such as airlines, hotel, surface transportation, etc. grows with the growth of tourism industry.
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3. Foreign Exchange earning: Many tourist destinations attract a good number of foreign tourists. This helps the country earn foreign exchange.
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4. Recreation: Travel based recreation provides relief from the monotony of daily routine. A change in place and climate helps a traveler to recharge his mind, body and spirit.
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5. Economic growth: Tourism helps in the development of economy of a country. It helps in the overall GDP development of a country. It helps the local people to earn their livelihood. The tourists spend lavishly during vacation. The local people engaged in assisting the tourists earn a good income.
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6. Meet new people: It helps the local people to get in touch with the people and country. It also helps building international relations.
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7. Cultural exchange: Tourism gives opportunity to people of various cultures to assimilate together. People belonging to various cultures meet together and understand each other. This gives them an opportunity to build respect for each other. Hence, it fosters cultural harmony.
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8. Health and wellness: Many people visit other places for the purpose of getting treatment for diseases, improving health and prevent diseases. This is called Medical and health tourism. Wellness tourism aim at achieving complete mental, psychological and physical well-being. There are many tourism destinations offering yoga, aerobics, and other therapies for improving health and wellness.
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9. Fun and enjoyment: Many people travel for fun and enjoyment. They simply do whatever excites them, or gives them enjoyment.
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10. Spend time with families: The life of modern people is hectic. They are too busy in their professional life. There is immense pressure even on children. Hence, such people plan for a holiday trip to spend quality time with their families.
Disadvantages of Tourism
The disadvantages of tourism includes increased expenditure, time-consuming, environmental hazards, loss of architecture and ecological balance, increase in waste products, damage to wild-life, and disruption in socio-economic and cultural setup.
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1. Tourism involves huge expenditure on part of the tourists. Travelling costs includes vehicle hire charges, hotel and resort rent, food cost, etc. This increases the overall spending of the person.
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2. You need to take out few days out of your busy schedule to visit tourist places. Hence, tourism is often time-consuming.
3. Leisure trips are good for health, mind and body. However, hectic trips may cause stress and effect health.
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4. It may also lead to environmental hazards such as environmental pollution due to use of cigars, plastic bags.
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5. In order to attract more tourists and earn more profits sprawling resorts are built cutting down thousands of planting trees beside sea beaches.
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6. These resorts destroy both scenic beauty of the place by paying no attention to local architecture and ecology.
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7. As a result of indiscriminate construction of high-rise buildings and infrastructure facilities, the provision of water supply and waste disposal facilities may get disrupted.
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8. Overuse of natural wealth is a serious problem, tourist overuse of mountain trails resulting in abundance in dumping of waste products, food tins, etc.
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9. Damage to wildlife parks is a visible phenomenon. The ground vegetation may suffer due to the tourists’ shoes. Food habits of animal impaired.
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10. Due immense changes, pollution, and dirt, the landscape may lose its scenic beauty.
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11. Tourism may have damaging socio-cultural effects. Local people demean themselves to earn more or imitate alien culture, new lifestyles, foreign culture.
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12. Famous tourist spots attract an inflow of residing population. This may lead to an increase in demand for residential houses, roads, and food for permanent population. Under such situation, an increase in tourist activities beyond certain level may adversely affect the economy of the state.
Provide examples
Elephant Nature Park
is an elephant rescue and rehabilitation center in Northern Thailand where you can volunteer and visit to help. We have been involved in dozens of rescues which have created our thriving elephant herd. The park provides a natural environment for elephants, dogs, cats, buffaloes and many other animals under our care.
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Volunteers and visitors contribute to the healing while learning about their lives past and present. Arrange a visit to all our projects in Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar.
Koh Talu Island Resort
The activity for conserve the sea through the tourism of "Koh Talu Island Resort". In the coastal fishing resources management project by the community to establish a complete underwater world into ecotourism. Invite tourists to snorkeling diving and planting coral to create habitat for marine animals, conserve turtle. Now it can release turtles back to the gulf of Thailand has more than 4,000.