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demarketing — English
A management strategy to limit and control the numbers of visitors to fragile or sensitive tourism destinations. Certain tourist facilities, like Disneyland and Sun City, have been created to be robust and they can withstand a never ending deluge of masses of visitors. Unlike these, certain tourism destinations such as limestone caves, catacombs, salt mines, coral reefs, nature reserves, game parks, sacred sites and places of meditation and rememberance are fragile and/or not suited to cope with masses of tourists all the time (see “carrying capacity”). Of course, the public can never be told not to visit a tourist site, because visitors are the life blood of any tourist site. However, if the destination is damaged by too many visitors, management measures have to be taken or the site will be destroyed, and management could be accused of “killing the goose that lays the golden eggs”. There is justifiable concern that the carrying capacity of the Kruger National Park is being exceeded by too many day visitors and the development of a number of new small camps. Nature reserves like Yellow Stone and Yosemite in the USA have had to limit visitor numbers years ago – if for no other reason than to relieve the traffic jams in the reserves! There are various ways of limiting the visitors, namely increasing the entrance fees, prohibiting children, requiring advance booking, disallowing visitors to move around without a guide, allowing a limited number of visitors per day, prohibiting food and beverages on the site, prohibiting photography, barring visitors’ access to the most fragile areas or precious artefacts, and so forth. Tourism management is not as easy as it often seems, and with tourism being the one of the fastest growing industries in the world, these problems are going to increase rather than decrease.
