Local Perception of Impact-Attitudes-Actions towards Tourism Development in the Urlaubsregion Murtal in Austria

Mike Peters, Chung-Shing Chan and Anita Legerer
Additional contact information
Mike Peters: Department of Strategic Management, Marketing and Tourism, Faculty of Business and Management, University of Innsbruck, Karl-Rahner-Platz 3, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
Chung-Shing Chan: Department of Geography and Resource Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, N.T., Hong Kong, China
Anita Legerer: MCI Tourism, Management Center Innsbruck, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 7, 1-28

Abstract: Local residents are always the recipients of economic, environmental and socio-cultural impacts from tourism development. Residents’ perceived impacts, attitudes towards tourism and the resultant supportive or opposing actions collectively affect the success of tourism, but are not thoroughly understood especially in small regions with rapid growth. The study investigated how the tourism impacts receive local perception, determine local attitudes and in turn lead to active or passive supportive action. The predisposition of linkage between attitude and behaviour is explored with the underlying aspects of impacts. Through the establishment of hypotheses of the relationship and an empirical survey-based study in Urlaubsregion Murtal (URM) in Austria, findings from local populations suggest that local attitude is significantly influenced by tourism impacts. In particular, socio-cultural impacts influenced attitude to a greater extent than the economic and environmental dimensions. The overall prevalent residents’ attitude in the URM is highly positive as the respondents indicated a sense of openness towards tourism development and the vast majority agreed that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. A significant positive relationship between attitude and support is detected. However, the residents also intended to act more passively than actively to supporting tourism development, but the connection from attitude to specific active or passive actions is not apparent.

Keywords: active support; passive support; residents’ attitude; supportive actions; tourism impact; Urlaubsregion Murtal (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/7/2360/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/7/2360/ (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:gam:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:7:p:2360-:d:156706

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().