Contents
- Most residents hold two opinions about tourism at once
- Research keeps returning to a simple exchange
- The exchange looks different from each street
- Power and trust explain what the exchange leaves out
- Residents judge tourism through their own free time
- Events are where attitudes change fastest
- The industry asks its guests everything and its neighbors almost nothing
- Trust grows from small promises that are kept
What do the people living in a destination really think about tourism? Usually something more mixed, and more reasonable, than either the industry or its loudest critics assume. Residents’ attitudes toward tourism development tend to rest on three things: how they weigh what tourism gives them against what it costs them, whether they trust the people who manage its growth, and whether they still have access to the streets, beaches and parks that make up their own daily life. When those three hold, most residents support tourism, often warmly. When they break, support fades long before anyone notices it in the visitor figures.
That is not a soft, sentimental point. A place whose residents stop welcoming tourism gradually loses the very life that visitors came to see, and the businesses that depend on visitors lose with it.
Most residents hold two opinions about tourism at once
Talk to people in any busy destination and you will rarely hear a single, settled view. The same person can be proud that visitors come from far away to see their old quarter and tired of the queue at the bakery every summer morning. They can depend on tourism for a family income and resent the way it has changed the rents on their street. Neither opinion cancels the other.
Researchers have noticed this too. In a 2024 discussion paper in the Journal of Global Hospitality and Tourism, Christopher Dutt points to the lack of distinction between tourists and tourism as one of the gaps in how resident attitudes are studied. From the field, that distinction rings true to me. Many residents like visitors as people, the couple asking for directions, the family at the next table, while disliking what tourism as an industry does to their housing, their transport or their quiet season. Others are the opposite: they have nothing against the idea of tourism, but a certain kind of visitor behavior wears them out.
When the industry asks whether residents “support tourism”, it often blurs these two questions into one, and then it is surprised by the answer.
Research keeps returning to a simple exchange
For decades, the most common explanation in academic work has been social exchange theory. The idea is straightforward: residents support tourism when they believe the benefits they receive outweigh the costs they bear. Jobs, income, better services and a livelier city sit on one side of the scale. Crowding, higher prices, noise and the loss of familiar places sit on the other.
The theory has lasted because it fits a lot of what we see. A review of 90 journal articles on residents’ attitudes, published between 2011 and 2017 in four leading tourism journals, found that social exchange theory was still dominant in the field, with newer frameworks only beginning to appear. The same review notes that quantitative methods dominate as well, which means most of what we know comes from surveys and scales rather than long conversations.
I don’t dismiss the exchange view. It explains why a hotel worker and a retired neighbor on the same street can feel so differently about the same tour coach. But it treats residents a little like customers weighing a purchase, and people are not only calculating what they gain. They are also asking whether the deal was offered to them fairly.
The exchange looks different from each street
Benefits and costs are rarely spread evenly across a destination. The income from a busy season tends to gather around certain districts, certain owners and certain kinds of jobs. The costs often spread wider and land on people who see little of the income: residents whose rents rise as flats become short stays for visitors or monthly homes for digital nomads, commuters who share a bus with suitcases, families who stop going to a beach they grew up on.
From inside the industry, I see a habit that makes this worse. We report the total of the visitor economy: arrivals, spending, occupancy, jobs created. Totals look good almost by definition, because they add up every benefit and leave the distribution invisible. A resident does not live in the total. They live on one street, and they judge tourism by what happens on that street.
So two destinations with similar visitor numbers can have very different moods among residents. In one, a good share of the spending reaches small shops, local guides, family restaurants and suppliers from the region. In the other, most of it stays inside a few large properties and leaves with them. The visitor numbers are the same. The exchange, seen from the street, is not.
Power and trust explain what the exchange leaves out
A paper by Robin Nunkoo in Procedia Economics and Finance looks closely at social exchange theory and argues that two of its core elements, power and trust, have rarely been brought together in a single study, even though they have significant potential to explain whether communities accept tourism. That observation matches the field better than almost anything else I have read on the subject.
Think about how residents actually describe their frustration. It is rarely a clean calculation of costs against benefits. It sounds more like this: decisions are made somewhere else, by people who have never lived here, and we hear about them when the construction starts. That is a statement about power. Or: they promised the new hotel would hire locally and keep the beach path open, and neither happened. That is a statement about trust.
Residents who feel they have some influence over how tourism grows, and who have seen promises kept, will tolerate a surprising amount of inconvenience. Residents who feel ignored will resent even modest growth. The second group, as far as I can see, is not made up of people who dislike visitors but of people who no longer believe anyone is listening. The scheduling habits behind overtourism, with every group at the same sights at the same hours, tend to deepen that feeling well before the crowds become a headline.
Residents judge tourism through their own free time
A part of this picture that research and industry often underplay is everyday recreation. Residents do not experience tourism mainly as an economic figure. They experience it in their free hours, and I think any talk of quality of life tourism has to start there: on the promenade after work, in the park on a Sunday, at the beach in the early evening, on the bus home from a match. If those places stay open, cared for and shared fairly, residents tend to see visitors as part of a lively city. If they become crowded, expensive or rearranged around guests, attitudes harden quickly.
Asking why recreation matters is, to me, a tourism question as much as a community one. A destination that protects residents’ access to their own beaches, trails and squares, and keeps programming them through the quiet months, is protecting the goodwill its tourism depends on. A place planned only around visitor attractions often discovers too late that the good mood of its residents was part of the product. Serious destination development treats residents’ free time as one of the things it is building, not as a cost to be managed around.
Events are where attitudes change fastest
Nothing tests residents’ patience, or builds their pride, as quickly as an event. A festival, a marathon, a congress or a large sports weekend arrives all at once and is impossible to ignore. Roads close, hotels fill, a square becomes a stage, a park becomes a fan zone.
Residents tend to judge these moments, and the social impact of events in general, in a very particular way. Were they told in advance, clearly and in good time? Could they take part, or were they only an obstacle to be managed? Did the regular programs they rely on carry on, or were they cancelled without a word? Did anything stay afterwards? The community events that people return to for years usually answer these questions well, because they are built with residents rather than around them.
At the opposite extreme, mega events can shift a city’s mood in either direction for a long time. When residents feel the event was organized for them as well as for visitors, the memory becomes part of local pride. When they feel it simply passed through, they remember the closures.
Residents rarely turn against visitors themselves; they turn against the sense that their place is being decided without them.
The industry asks its guests everything and its neighbors almost nothing
Hotels, tour operators, venues and event organizers measure guest satisfaction obsessively. We send post-stay emails, track review scores, run feedback forms at the exit and design careful survey questions after every event. Very few of us ever ask the people who live around our properties and programs what they think.
I understand why. Guests pay us, and residents do not. But the residents shape the guest experience every day, as staff, as shopkeepers, as neighbors, as the people a visitor asks for directions. A hotel that knows exactly how its guests rate the breakfast and has no idea how its street feels about its coaches is managing half of its own business blind.
Asking them does not need a research project. A short annual conversation with the neighbors, a few questions added to an event impact assessment, a simple record of complaints and how they were handled: these would tell a business more about its future than many of the reports it already produces.
Trust grows from small promises that are kept
If power and trust shape attitudes as much as benefits do, then the practical work is less about large campaigns explaining the value of tourism and more about the many small, kept promises that destination stewardship is made of. The coach operator who said buses would wait outside the old quarter and keeps them there. The hotel that said it would hire locally and can show it. The event organizer who said a square would reopen on Monday morning and does. The destination body that shares the figures it collects instead of only the good ones.
Campaigns that try to persuade residents to love tourism usually do little. People believe what they see on their own street, and they see it every day. What changes attitudes is the experience of being told the truth early, being asked before rather than after, and watching the places they use for their own free time stay theirs.
Start with the street outside your own door.