Residential tourism as a undetected phenomenon: examples of impacts on public governance and on the environment

• Autores: Tullio Romita
• Localización: Turismo residencial: Nuevos estilos de vida: de turistas a residentes / coord. por Tomás Manuel Mazón Martínez, 2018, ISBN 978-84-1302-011-2, págs. 159-174
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • As the scholars of the tourism phenomenon know, the numbers on the basis of which the trend of tourism is studied, in particular those relating to tourist flows, are also useful for establishing the weight of tourism in the different territorial areas crossed by the phenomenon. However, not rarely, the determination of the real situation of a tourist destination on the basis of these numbers is imprecise, that is, the official statistics fail to fully capture the tourist condition of an area or a place, thus negatively influencing the choices of public and private decision-makers. In fact, already through the empirical observation of what happens during the summer periods it is possible to understand tourist territories other than those described on the basis of official statistics. For example, the presence of long queues of cars in the queue along the roads leading to the seaside and mountain resorts, or long queues in restaurants, pizzerias, ice cream parlors or supermarkets, or even the revitalization and the repopulation of the villages located in the inland areas, etc., are just some of the examples of what can be found of very popular tourist destinations, but that the official statistics represent us as tourists with little relevance.

    Therefore, the context of analysis becomes even more problematic when, and in addition, we are faced with forms of widespread tourism that escape the official surveys of tourism data, and that are practiced through living arrangements that are obviously not registered or not to census.

    Our hypothesis is that these forms of tourism have an important weight in tourism and that they are often predominant than the official ones. Moreover, that among these is prevalent that which is practiced in private homes for rent, or second homes owned, mostly, but less and less, by families and for periods of time generally higher than those of conventional tourism.

    Through this work we will try to reason on the validity of the hypothesis just formulated. The general objective that we intend to pursue is, however, to focus attention on the problem of so-called residential tourism as an undetected phenomenon, given the many and important consequences it has on the classification and determination of tourism flows, on the planning of public intervention policies in the tourism field, in the economic and social life of the region.