Impact of Residents Attitudes on the Acceptance Degree of Beach Tourism, Sports Tourism, Nature Tourism and Cultural Tourism

Abstract

The study of residents’ attitudes is important for the management of tourist destinations. Residents formed their attitude towards tourism through a cost-benefits analysis based on their perception of the tourism impacts. Residents have different levels of acceptance of different types of tourism and the aim of this paper is to contrast if there is a relationship between the attitude towards tourism and the degree of acceptance of beach tourism, sports tourism, nature tourism and cultural tourism. The data analysis was performed using Partial Least Squares on a sample of 418 residents of Ibiza, finding that: there is no causal relationship between the attitude of residents and the degree of acceptance of cultural tourism; the strongest causal relationships are between the general attitude of residents and beach tourism and between the general attitude and sports tourism. The main contribution is that a tourism-friendly attitude does not imply an equivalent support to any type of tourism, although not to generate controversy. If there is a strong relationship between general attitude and acceptance of sports tourism, in the case of Ibiza.