Etapas

The issue of the economic impacts was examined through questions such as “what kinds of economic impact do you think tourism will bring to local community?” Interview transcripts revealed that the majority of visitors affirmed the positive effects. Economic benefits were frequently mentioned by respondents, and included ‘Attract investors’, ‘Government generate ticket and tax revenue’, ‘Increase revenue for residents’, ‘create job opportunities’, ‘Develop related industry’, while only two costs ‘Seasonal revenue’, as well as ‘change traditional labour structure’ were reported. Interview transcripts revealed that many respondents focused on the positive economic impacts for the mountain village, and they believed that residents on the mountain were the ‘lucky ones’ who can directly earn a fortune from tourism development.

Economic benefits

Nearly all respondents mentioned that tourism development helps local residents to find jobs, increase family revenue and improve their quality of life. These findings provide some support for the previous studies reviewed in Chapter 2 that have found tourism leads to direct economic benefits to a local community by providing employment, increasing locals’ income, and improving local living standards (Kala, 2008). Additionally, confirming this finding, Pendleton and Rooked (2006) pointed out that visitors create a positive economic impact for a destination through expenditure that support jobs related to tourism service. Visitors had an intuitive sense of the means by which residents’ became involved in tourism businesses, by, for example, selling native products, opening restaurants and working as cleaners. They believed tourism could bring a fortune for local residents, and provide many work opportunities to enable the residents to have a better life. Indeed, as described in Chapter 3, all of 28 families located in Yuehua Street had taken advantage of location and operated tourism businesses to make money. Besides creating job opportunities, some respondents

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pointed out that tourism development helped residents to sell their native products easily, such as dry vegetables, salt meat (see Photo 5.9) and mountain tea, which could be seen as another way to increase family revenue. Indeed, from the author’s daily observation, visitors will buy local special product to take home after they taste them in the restaurant. Some important comments made by respondents included:

“…tourism helps local residents with more opportunities to make money from tourism business. Their life qualities become better year by year. I have come to the mountain to pray for 15 years: I saw their changes” (Male pilgrim from Wuyuan)

“…of course, they can make big money…you see the price in this small village is really high.

One RMB water will be sold at 3 RMB or even 5 RMB a bottle, which absolutely increases residents’ revenue…” (Elder visitor from Guangzhou)

With regard to the ability to attract investors, this subject was mentioned by respondents who noticed the real estate constructions below the mountain. Although, they not knowing the realities of this external investment in Mt Qiyun; they still made judgements based on the existence of those construction sites. Thus respondents stated that :

“…normally, tourism can attract outside investors to come here to invest in facilities, which create job opportunities for local residents” (Male visitors from Huangshan city).

“ when the mountain became famous, it will attract lots of outside investors and some investment, which is used to improve local facilities and economy” (Male visitors from Shanghai).

However, a small number of comments indicated a contrary view that the outside investors will take the majority of revenues earned from tourism and expatriate those monies elsewhere.

One middle school teacher, who had more depth of thought about tourism development in Photo 5.9 Homemade salt meat sells or serves to

visitors

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Qiyun Mountain, was concerned that local family businesses could not compete with a large company, which would pose strong competition. Finally, a small number of respondents mentioned that Mt Qiyun tourism helps to develop other related industry, such as the restaurant and transport industries. These comments included:

“…I guess the tourism industry can encourage other industry to develop together such as transport, tour farm industry...”(Female visitor from Jiangxi)

“ although Mt Qiyun tourism has not developed very well, anyway, tourism development can more or less motivate other related industry…like retail business, transport industry, restaurant industry…”(Student from Huangshan University)

Economic cost

On the other hand, respondents critiqued two main negative economic effects. Tourism development in Mt Qiyun is quite seasonal, which lead to seasonal jobs and revenue.

Respondents noting this tended to be group who travelled in the off-peak period, especially in cold winter. Based on the author’s observation, the majority of residents had no business in the winter days. One respondent stated that: “I think the tourism here is quite seasonal, when I visited here on a winter’s day last time, there were no other visitors here… I think local residents’ income should be not stable”. In addition, a few respondents mentioned that tourism development may change the local labour structure, at least in this village, that “No one work in farm, everyone involved in operating tourism business, which was far away from their traditional life”. Visitors, therefore, expressed their concern about the reasons for being involved in tourism, noting “tourism destroyed rural traditional labour structure, because those residents only want to make quick money in tourism rather than work in the farm”(No.15), and “It is slow to earn money from farming, while in the tourism business, you can get cash everyday…”(No.23).

In the following section, the Catpac software will again be employed to provide some support to confirm visitors’ views of the economic impacts.

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Analysis by Catpac

Figure 5.3 Catpac analysis of economic impacts

The original transcripts relating to the economic impacts were entered into the CatPac software for further analysis. Three steps were used: frequency statistics, hierarchical cluster analysis, and ThoughtView perceptual maps. The Catpac map showed that there were 191 total key words in the original text, and 25 unique words. In this analysis, the individual words are both listed by frequency of use and alphabetically. It was found that the word

‘Revenue’ was the most frequently word and that it occurred 21 times, which was 11% of all occurrences. This was followed by ‘Increase’ (18 times, 9.4%), ‘local’ (13 times, 6.8%),

‘industry’ (12 times, 6.3%), as well as ‘jobs’ (12 times, 6.3 %). By analysing the hierarchical cluster map, 8 themes could be identified in economic impact. This analysis describes the relationships between the most commonly occurring concepts in the text analysed, and each cluster evaluated by the height of the stacked shading (^) showing the strength of the relationship between concepts (Hsieh, 2004).

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Indicated by Figure 5.3, the first cluster (circled in orange) should be considered as the strongest relation among six words, they are : ‘restaurant’, ‘residents’ , ‘tourism’, ‘revenue’,

‘increase’. These words revealed that tourism development helped local residents to increase revenue by opening farmer restaurants. The second cluster (circled in red) was combined with three words ‘change’, ‘labour’ and ‘structure’, and by checking the original text, it could be found that this theme was mentioned as a visitor negative perception of economic impact, namely ‘tourism development may change local traditional labour structure’. The third theme (circled in green) showed a close relationship between words ‘quality’ and ‘life’. By consulting the raw data, it indicated that these two words were related to the economic impact of ‘tourism development may change residents’ life quality’. The fourth theme (circled in blue) consisted of ‘businesses’, ‘money’ and ‘seasonal’, which confirmed the thematic finding that ‘Tourism development in Mt Qiyun is quite seasonal, which lead to seasonal jobs and revenue’. After that, Catpac successfully identified ‘local’, and ‘industry’ in the fifth theme (circled in purple). Reverting to the raw data, it was found that these words were related to the impact of ‘tourism development can motivate other local industry development’

in Mt Qiyun area. Followed by the sixth theme that is circled in black, this showed a close relationship between ‘find’ and ‘jobs’. When checking the original data, it could be found that respondents mainly stated that ‘tourism development can help local residents to find jobs’, ‘residents can find tourism job easily’. The seventh theme circled in grey, has the words ‘ticket’ and ‘tax’, which indicates visitors believe tourism can bring tax and ticket revenue to government. Finally, the last important theme (circled in yellow) was used to show the relationship between ‘attract’, ‘investor’. The raw text revealed that visitors believed that tourism development can attract external investors to come to mountain and invest more in facilities. Accordingly, when comparing the thematic themes and software result, consistency of interpretation is found.

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Figure 5.4 Structure of Tourism impact based on visitors’ perceptions

Figure 5.4 above describes the structure of tourism impacts from the visitors’ perceptions recorded in the current study. It could be seen that visitors were more likely to care about environmental impact. This is perhaps because visitors can access the environment impacts

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by direct observation. Social-cultural and economic impacts are not mentioned in such a great detail by visitors, reflecting visitors’ lesser direct knowledge of these impacts. Nonetheless, the visitors show an ability to arrive at conclusions based upon past experiences, general knowledge and observation that provide a basis upon which to examine the issues being considered. In the next section, visitors’ satisfaction as well as some potential development problems will be father examined.