Intelligence and Innovation for City Tourism Sustainability

For decades, tourism sustainability in cities meant just economic growth. Destination managers, local authorities and industry leaders focused their concerns on promotion and commercial activities, strongly convinced that cities would admit a steady, almost unlimited growth of visitors. Thus, according to statistics in Europe, city tourism growth indexes have overcome traditional leisure tourism, getting more attention from governments as a fairly harmless recipe for struggling against social and economic crisis. However, the complexity of urban communities together with unexpected, uncontrolled travel patterns is unveiling important conflicts and impacts of such city tourism blooming. In recent years, many destinations have suddenly been awakened from the tourism dream by their own local communities and media. Unexpectedly, the traditional welcoming atmosphere has turned into rejection and hostile attitudes. As a result, sustainability is compromised. Therefore, future city tourism sustainability will require a new approach. Social and environmental impacts must be seriously considered in tourism planning, in order to achieve economic sustainability. Developing urban destinations must learn from those where such sustainability is nowadays under risk; they will eventually have to face the same problems. The aim of this chapter is to identify—from the experience of practitioners—how some leading tourist cities are being affected at different scale by new impacts and what strategies are being implemented to cope with them. Size matters, of course, but the benchmarking applied in tourism planning by the author demonstrates that there are common patterns that may be considered by any destination managers as useful guidelines for planning in any city.