Residents’ perceptions of tourism activity in a rural North-Eastern Portuguese community: a cluster analysis

Lopes Hélder Da Silva (), Ribeiro Vítor () and Remoaldo Paula ()
Additional contact information
Ribeiro Vítor: University of Minho and Landscape, Department of Geography, Heritage and Territory Laboratory (Lab2PT), Braga, Portugal
Remoaldo Paula: University of Barcelona, Water Research Institute (IdRA), Group of ClimatologyBarcelonaSpain

Bulletin of Geography. Socio-economic Series, 2019, vol. 46, issue 46, 119-135

Abstract: The recognition of the role of tourism planners in seeking to contribute to local residents’ well-being by mitigating the potential costs of tourism development has been given more attention in the last decades. Several studies on the perception of positive or negative impacts, based on sustainability (namely the three pillars: economic, sociocultural and environmental) have been developed. However, the studies have been somewhat limited in terms of approaches, namely with respect to the contribution and participation of stakeholders. In this study, we attempted to use a bidirectional analysis of involvement and tourism knowledge to segment the residents and analyse their perception of the impacts. A total of 373 valid surveys were applied in a rural mountainous municipality (Boticas) during 2015 and 2016. In this municipality, tourism (activity) is an emergent activity. The results show that more informed and more involved residents have more positive perceptions of tourism than other groups, while less informed and less involved residents have more negative perceptions of it. The study contributes to increasing the knowledge about residents’ perceptions of tourism, adding the aspects of involvement, especially in rural areas. This type of proposal can be applied to any destination to help manage residents’ opinions and, consequently, their support of tourism development.

Keywords: rural tourism; perceptions; segmentation; clusters; rural development; boticas (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2478/bog-2019-0038 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:vrs:buogeo:v:46:y:2019:i:46:p:119-135:n:8

DOI: 10.2478/bog-2019-0038

Access Statistics for this article

Bulletin of Geography. Socio-economic Series is currently edited by Daniela Szymańska

More articles in Bulletin of Geography. Socio-economic Series from Sciendo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().