Hard and Soft Tourism

The concept of soft tourism emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s as one of the forms of sustainable tourism in response to large-scale unsustainable tourism development. Hard tourism, then, is a term used to describe this type of mass tourism development that leads to detrimental negative effects and impacts on the environment, local people, and economies. In reality, hard and soft tourism can be seen as two extreme [Page 566]types of tourism development on a continuum of development strategies. Soft tourism has been advocated specifically for more peripheral and rural areas.

Soft tourism and hard tourism advocate for two completely different types of tourism in the travel market. Jost Krippendorf noted that the environment is the “basic raw material” for the tourism industry and once ...