Review of Harrison, D. Tourism and the Less Developed World: Issues and Case Studies

Abstract

David Harrison has assembled 16 colleagues, mostly from the United Kingdom and North America, to summarize their tourism development experiences in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific. Although all papers provide useful insights, the opening and concluding papers by Harrison himself provide the most interesting and provocative content of the collection. He sets the tone for the volume at the outset by observing, “[t]he notion of ‘sustainable tourism’ is at best ambiguous and more often than not virtually useless … the tourism industry can be sustained for long periods, albeit at the cost of specific destination areas, environments, and communities” (p. 8).