Tourism development: A capacity dynamic

Abstract

The internationally adopted definition of tourism prompts to develop a systemic dynamic approach of tourism development. The paper proposes to conceptualize tourism development as a system interlinking three agents: transport, domestic tourism activities and the visitor; generating three types of development tourism development dynamics. In a second step, it uses this framework to develop, with a minimalist set of hypotheses, a capacity-based model enabling to consider destination tourism development as a microfounded supply-driven systemic dynamic process. Through the lens of the model, exhaustion or asymmetric distribution of market power may halt destination tourism development. Using the model’s framework, the structuring forces of the Tourism Area Life Cycle (TALC) are explained by the dual impact of capacity dynamics: accelerating by increasing arrivals, and at the same time decelerating by declining price elasticities.