4.2 What does sustainable tourism look like?

Sustainable tourism is not a ‘type’ of tourism in the same way leisure travel, seeing friends and family and business travel are (see Section 2). There is not even a single agreed definition of what sustainable tourism is. Instead, there is a global aspiration that all forms of tourism can and should be sustainable over time.

There are three pillars of sustainable tourism: social, economic and environmental often known by the acronym SEE. Let’s dig into these more deeply.

These show that sustainability is both for tourist destinations and for tourists to understand and put into practice. To be sustainable, then, tourism should be able to address these issues both now and through time.

Butler (2021) also defines sustainability as ‘limits (because)…in almost all…contexts, there is a maximum number of tourists who can be successfully accommodated.’ This is related to another term often used in tourism; carrying capacity.