Conclusion: managing rapid tourism growth

The purpose of this concluding paper is to distill several guiding principles, as to how communities can manage rapid tourism growth, drawn from the collection of articles in this theme issue. The paper provides a concise, grounded case study to anchor the overall conclusion of the theme issue.

It summarizes the essence of the different articles comprising the issue, identifies their common link to the strategic question and highlights the relevance of each.

The paper presents six guiding principles for managing rapid tourism growth, ranging from bolstering social support for residents’ livelihood and providing sustainable assistance for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to prioritizing community needs for transportation and mobility. Analytic tools to help mitigate the loss of place, identity and heritage and identify optimum levels of visitor numbers are also described.

The paper underscores problems emanating from rapid tourism growth and seeks to synthesize the disparate ideas on precipitous tourism-induced change by anchoring them largely (but not only) in the specific context of Macao as a highly urbanized city affected by rapid tourism growth.