Demarketing Tourism for Sustainability: Degrowing Tourism or Moving the Deckchairs on the Titanic?

C. Michael Hall and Kimberley J. Wood
Additional contact information
C. Michael Hall: Department of Management, Marketing and Entrepreneurship, University of Canterbury, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand
Kimberley J. Wood: Department of Management, Marketing and Entrepreneurship, University of Canterbury, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 3, 1-15

Abstract: Demarketing is generally recognized as that aspect of marketing that aims at discouraging customers in general or a certain class of customers in particular on either a temporary or permanent basis and has been increasingly posited as a potential tool to degrow tourism and improve its overall sustainability, particularly as a result of so-called overtourism. The paper provides an overview of the various ways in which demarketing has been applied in a tourism context and assesses the relative value of demarketing as a means of contributing to sustainability and degrowing tourism. It is argued that demarketing can make a substantial contribution to degrowing tourism at a local or even regional scale, but that the capacity to shift visitation in space and time also highlights a core weakness with respect to its contribution at other scales. The paper concludes by noting that the concept of degrowth also needs to be best understood as a continuum of which demarketing is only one aspect.

Keywords: social marketing; upstream demarketing; downstream demarketing; tourism system; sustainable tourism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/3/1585/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/3/1585/ (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:13:y:2021:i:3:p:1585-:d:492029

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 ().