Needs & Sustainable Tourism

Crowding perception at the archaeological site of Tulum, Mexico: a key indicator for sustainable cultural tourism.

Determining and managing excessive amounts of visitors has been one of the most ways to apply the principles of sustainable development to tourism. Overuse of natural or cultural resources has effects on two main elements: the resource itself and the visitor experience. However, it has been little applied to cultural or archaeological sites.

Crowding is the negative evaluation of the density of people in a specific site and its assessment allows for limitations on the maximum number of people that visitors expect to see at the same time in a specific place. Crowding perception is a visitor quality indicator for a more sustainable cultural tourism.

Since the 1990´s, cultural tourism has become an important part of the mass tourism market, evolving from low-volume, high income, and more educated tourists to high-volume, low-income, and less educated ones. The archaeological site of Tulum is a short 2 hours drive from Cancun and is located within the seaside resort of the Riviera Maya on the Mexican Caribbean. The rapid tourism development of the region, the geographical location, and the beauty of its landscape has caused the number of visitors at Tulum to increase exponentially since 2000. To record the standards of crowding, normative theory and the visual method were applied through the return potential model (RPM), as suggested by Jackson (1966). RPM evaluates the acceptance of a social group towards a given behavior. A quantitative questionnaire was designed based on a 9-point scale (from -4 to +4) developed by Heberlein and Vase (1977). Results show that visitor acceptability decreases as the number of people increase. International visitors are less tolerant to crowding as they show the most restrictive acceptable level of people at the same time at the archaeological site. Findings also confirm that crowding perception is a good indicator to evaluate the visitor experience and help to improve the operationalization of sustainable tourism at cultural sites.

Key words: Visitor management; heritage tourism; Tulum; indicators and standards; carrying capacity

Challenges of accessibility of a community heritage tourist route: the route of the caste war

The diagnosis of accessibility goes beyond adapting physical spaces for their transit, considering that the resource must be interpreted for all types of people, involving economic, spatial and temporal accessibility, criteria on which the research is focused.

To make this diagnosis, a multidisciplinary investigation was developed that compiled information from different sectors with qualitative and quantitative tools that combined the recording of data and the opinion of the inhabitants, key informants; officials, museum workers, tourism service providers, non-governmental organizations and visitors.

Accessibility is a multivariate concept, which is why the indicators used made it possible to collect information in an objective, rigorous and relevant way. The data were collected in an instrument based on cultural indicators, which were designed in categories. The research approach was qualitative, with the Participatory Action Research and ethnographic techniques like participant observation (PAR), interviews and also document review.

Based on the results, the disadvantages of community groups were identified in terms of competitiveness in the face of other tourist typologies, lacking specialists who design a corporate identity, ignorance of the management, infrastructure and adequate spaces that allow accessible tourism, as well such as lack of access to information and lack of training. It's necessary to propose promotional strategies focused on rural cultural products, which promote and publicize the sites and activities designated by the community as heritage, which are willing to share with visitors, so that local hosts are the ones who offer this service. Among the strategies that are applied are: equal participation and involvement by women and men, the incorporation of students and academics in training and counseling courses.

These products face important challenges: they must differentiate themselves from others to consolidate their local identity, and at the same time, form alliances that allow them to strengthen local tourism products and services by providing the visitor with options that complement their experience, and simultaneously achieve integration, growth and regional development of the localities involved.