Bachelor Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Tourism -
Miscellaneous, grade: 1,0, Heilbronn University, language: English,
abstract: Tourism is often considered a welcome source of economic
development providing employment opportunities, producing means of
earning foreign exchange, and stimulating the local economy. The tourism
sector is more complex than economic activity alone, since the social,
political, technical and ecological environments also have a strong
influence on it and vice versa. "Conventional" mass tourism is
associated with numerous negative effects, such as environmental
destruction and loss of cultural heritage. For this reason, some of the
terms that have surfaced over the last decade are "sustainable" tourism
and "alternative" tourism. The increasing awareness of consumers about
Corporate Social Responsibility and environmental issues has brought
forward a new target group named the "morally conscious tourist".
Destinations and especially international corporations alike advertise
with these terms as a means to differentiate themselves, reaching out
for this new, emerging customer segment. However, sustainability should
not merely be a marketing ploy to reach new customers or to perform
"greenwashing" in order to appear more environmentally friendly. In
fact, it is a complex and difficult task to achieve the implementation
of sustainable business practices and to develop sustainable tourism
products. It is exactly this challenge the research paper will focus on
by analyzing how to incorporate the principles of sustainability into
the marketing system of tourism businesses or destinations. An
exploratory as well as descriptive research design based on external and
internal secondary data is used in order to obtain information that can
answer the research question. The first aspect to be studied in this
research paper is the development of tourism and the tourism industry
with regards to the emergence of mass tourism, as well as the critic
