Resident's perception of tourism development in Greenville, SC, USA

Tourism development has been conceived as an action to bring economic benefits to the community. However, tourism development may have contributed to environmental degradation and negative sociocultural impact as well. The success of tourism development is premised on the idea of maintaining a good relationship between residents, tourists, private business owners and the government. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between tourism impacts, tourism development and the way residents' demographic variables moderate the relationship between perceptions of tourism impacts and tourism development, as well as economic dependency for its correlation effect on the relationship. This study also compared the potential differences between downtown Greenville, South Carolina residents and individuals residing in the Greenville County. The importance of it is that downtown Greenville is a major draw whereby downtown residents are in close proximity the breadth of tourism impacts than others residing in the broader county.;To meet these goals, 320 individuals were intercepted in downtown Greenville. Among 295 lived in Greenville county, 251 of them completed a self-administered survey for an 85.1% adjusted response rate. This study had several findings: 1) Economic impact was the only significant predictor of residents' supports for tourism development; 2) Residents' demographic variables (age, gender, length of residence) did not moderate the relationship between residents' supports for tourism development and their perceptions of tourism impacts; 3) Economic dependency did not influence residents' supports for tourism development significantly; and 4) Where respondents lived (i.e., downtown vs county) did not make any differences on their supports for tourism development and their perceptions of tourism impacts. The study also provided several implications of academics and practice 1) Tourism planners should make sure that the economy plays the leading role of the community development and sociocultural and environmental aspects don't get worse on negatively affecting the community; 2) Given the result that none of the demographic variables that moderated tourism development and tourism impacts, more additional factors influencing resident's perceptions of tourism development should be discovered; 3) Tourism planners should work on building on bonds between economic as well as sociocultural and environmental benefits of tourism and resident's personal lives; and 4) Since both county residents and downtown residents perceived tourism development and tourism impacts in the same, tourism planners should create some marketing campaigns focusing on the sustainability so that both downtown and county residents realize tourism development and its impacts. Furthermore, since few studies have focused on the potential differences of the location of residence more research is needed if indeed these perceptions change as a community's downtown tourist zone evolves overtime.