Assessing EU Tourism Workforce Perceptions and Attitudes towards Tourism Development in Sun and Sea Destinations: Nationality and Gender Do Matter

1. Introduction

In the 1960s, travel and tourism was seen worldwide, but particularly in the developed countries, as a new industry with considerable potential for job creation and income growth; thus, at that point scholars and policymakers highlighted the positive impact in terms of economic development disregarding the potential negative impacts on the environment and on the local residents¹. One decade later, Doxey [1] in his seminal work introduced to tourism research the concept of assessing the impact of tourism in the host communities². In particular, he conceived a classification of the local residents based on their attitudes towards tourism from being very enthusiastic to being very critical. Later on, Pizam [2] emphasized the concern of negative impacts and developed an attitude index, while concluding that residents highly dependent of the tourist sector would tend to be more positive towards tourism development than the rest of the local residents. Based on these findings, they would focus on the benefits they would get (income, jobs, mainly) more than on the costs (negative externalities such as congestion or poorer services and/ or higher prices). Based on the premises of social exchange theory³, the respondents of our study, given their particular condition of tourism university students, and thus, future leaders and future workforce of the tourism sector, would theoretically be biased to perceiving a net benefit of tourism activity. Indeed, prior empirical evidence has shown that those residents economically dependent of the tourism sector, directly or indirectly, tend to have a more positive attitude towards tourism development ([3,4,5]). More specifically, Getz [6] suggested that those who personally benefit from tourism perceive greater economic benefits and fewer negative social and environmental impacts from its development than other residents⁴. Andereck et al. [7] underlined not only that it is easier to be more supportive when locals perceive more benefits but that negative impacts are not ignored either and in their study they seem similarly perceived by all locals (those who benefit more from tourism but also less). Akis et al. pointed out, for the case of Cyprus, that there was a net benefit created by the tourism industry and local residents believed in the advantages of tourism development [8]. More recently, Peters et al. findings confirmed in their study that advantages outweigh the disadvantages and that local residents’ attitudes towards tourism development depends on their perceived impacts [9]. Furthermore, they showed that a more positive attitude towards tourism development is influenced particularly by perceived socio cultural impacts rather than the environmental and economic impacts. Tourism labor is therefore assumed to have a more positive attitude than the local population that is not employed in the tourism sector. Certainly, in this context it seems vital for an optimal tourism management and planning to understand the differences in the perceived impacts by different local populations within the EU tourism industry based on nationality and gender. Malalla et al. investigated the influence of nationality on resident’s perceptions of tourism impacts and their support for tourism development in UAE by discriminating nationals from expatriate residents [10]. They found differences in perceptions but in spite of it both were supportive of tourism development within the same territory. Our main contribution is based on the hypothesis that nationality is a significant variable firstly in residents’ perception, secondly in tourism development attitude and lastly in tourism management strategies. In this study, our main goal has been to measure the pre-covid 19 perceptions and more precisely the overall attitude of a very specific population, representing at the time of data collection the future sector leadership and workforce, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been assessed, yet. In particular, to assess the attitude towards tourism development of the tourism employers and employees we decided to choose samples from two EU countries highly dependent on the tourism industry though at different levels of development: Spain and Croatia. It is worth noting that, before the Covid-19 pandemic, Spain and Croatia were placed among the EU member economies most highly dependent on tourism activity. However, Croatia, a small EU economy, depends on tourism ( production, employment, exports) to a much larger extent than Spain. As a matter of fact, Croatia, by some parameters, may be considered the EU economy most dependent on tourism activity [11]. However, we are very aware of the fact that Croatia and Spain's tourism industry is at a different stage of development and that the former has grown more rapidly over the past decade than the latter. We could say that Spain’s tourism sector is at a more mature stage than the Croatian sector. Empirical evidence on residents’ attitudes towards tourism development already distinguished between responses from host communities at different development stages of their tourism sectors [12] (but not focusing specifically on the perception of tourism university students, who would be the sector's future workforce, as we present in this study). Within this framework, and differentiated to some prior empirical evidence, our main hypothesis is that we observe the nationality of the respondents to be a significant variable in the assessment of local residents' attitudes towards the impact of tourism in their host community, contrary to their perception of the overcrowding, overbuilding and excess of carrying capacity. Gender do matter as well in the young generations but to a lesser extent. Furthermore, Allen et al. concluded that residents’ perceptions would become less enthusiastic as the level of tourism activity in a community would rise [13]. Perdue et al. would also state that after reaching a threshold, residents’ support for tourism would decline [14]. Milano et al. underlined that residents prone to more negative perceptions of tourism developments could be a consequence of overtourism [15]. As we know, global tourism activity peaked in 2019, and by that time the term overtourism was already coined in the industry [16]. Our data dates back to the pre-covid 19 times, in a scenario in which our respondents were already aware of such concern in the industry. Very recently, Berselli et al. suggested several indicators influencing residents perception of overtourism [17]. Ramkissoon pointed out that Covid 19 pandemic and its devastating effects in the global tourism industry made residents more tolerant of tourism impacts [18]. Our findings are based on qualitative and quantitative data reflected in a questionnaire designed to analyze the perception and attitude of tourism university students from Croatia and Spain towards tourism development. We report the results of a questionnaire survey administered in 2019 to 129 Spanish College students and 148 Croatian College students. Generally speaking, as Pizam had stated in his work, we do find that tourism college students show an overall sound positive attitude regarding the impact of tourism in the three dimensions of sustainability⁵ [2]. However, we report differences in the students' perceptions of the impact of the tourism sector. In other words, the perception of the benefits and the costs coming out of the tourism activity are different based on the nationality of the respondent. Our findings report students from Croatia perceive more the negative impact or the negative externalities of tourism development than the tourism college students from Spain. Based on our study we can state that their net perception (benefits minus costs) though positive is less supportive than their counterparts from Spain. The absolute outcome for Croatia is partly aligned with some empirical evidence which considers the more developed the tourism sector becomes, the greater the decline in residents' support towards tourism development [13,14,15].However, it is the relative outcome the most surprising one: Spain’s tourism workforce with a more mature travel and tourism industry seems more enthusiastic to their tourism development than the Croatian Tourism labor. There could be many different hypotheses to understand this differential behavior: size of the country, seasonality stress, stronger negative impacts, higher demand pressure, closer to overcapacity, among other factors. Within this social exchange trade theoretical framework, our goal was to identify differences in the response of the two samples given two major variables: nationality and gender. In short, the main goal of this research has been to understand if local residents’ responses to tourism and its sustainability vary while taking two different samples in a cross-cultural analysis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study taking into consideration the perception of tourism college students and the research results and policy implications would be the paper’s main contribution to the existing literature dedicated to assess local residents’ attitudes and perceptions towards the socioeconomic impact of the tourism activity. In this framework, Schubert et al. who underlined that the host communities perception of economic, environmental and social sustainability would influence their support of national tourism policies [19]. If so, every country’s tourism planners and marketers should focus on understanding well how their host communities perceive all economic, social and environmental impacts of tourism.

The structure of the article is as follows. After this introduction, section two describes the data collection process and the research methods. Section three presents the preliminary data and the results of the non-parametric analysis. Section four discusses the results, some of the policymaking implications and brings up issues for future research work. Finally, section five draws the main conclusions of the research.

2. Materials and Methods

The aim of this study has been to measure the perception of a specific part of the local residents: tourism university students having studied tourism economics during at least one year of University. We have in practice segmented the population of research given that our respondents are residents of Croatia or of Spain but confined to being first year tourism college students, which means they have some knowledge of tourism sustainability and of the socioeconomic and environmental impact of tourism. All in all, it is worth noting that this population was meant to be the tourism sector's future labor force. Understanding their attitudes towards tourism development is essential and very valuable for tourism sustainability management. Our findings are based on two samples: the first of the samples is based on Croatian tourism college students´ responses from the Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management in Opatija, Rijeka; the second sample is based on Spanish tourism college students’ responses from the Faculty of Commerce and Tourism in Madrid at Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).

To measure the perception and attitude of tourism college students from Croatia and Spain towards tourism development, we first design a questionnaire based on the 3 pillars of sustainability: economic, social and environmental pillars. It is worth mentioning that the questionnaire proposes eighteen questions, out of which thirteen focus on a positive impact⁶ of tourism activity while the other five questions focus on a negative impact⁷.In particular, two out of 18 questions, question 17 (negative impact of tourism activity) and question 18 (positive impact of tourism activity) clearly query about the environmental impact of tourism. More than half the questionnaire (a total of 10 questions)⁸ focus on the economic impact (questions regarding the impact on macroeconomic variables such as GDP; employment, inflation, and investment, and others such as: entrepreneurial opportunities awareness, the perception of a net positive impact of tourism, among others). Questions 4 and 10 ask about the need for involvement of the local population in its tourism planning and its satisfaction with the tourism planning strategy. Finally, four questions are meant to emphasize the social impact of tourism: impact on safety and security, impact on traffic congestion, impact on street cleanliness and impact on customs and traditions revitalization. A 5 point-Likert scale has been used to measure the weight of the respondents' perception towards tourism impact in their domestic economies; a scale in which 1 means "the respondent totally disagrees with the proposed sentence"; 2 means "the respondent partially disagrees with the proposed sentence"; 3 " the respondent neither disagrees nor agrees with the proposed sentence"; 4 " the respondent highly agrees with the proposed sentence"; and 5 "the respondent totally agrees with the proposed sentence". In addition to the 18 questions, the questionnaire proposes 2 dichotomous questions and one question in which respondents had three alternatives regarding their overall attitude: positive, negative or neutral. At the end, there was some room reserved for students' further comments. We carry out a questionnaire survey in which data was collected by paper and pencil mode and students' were some weeks ahead asked to voluntarily attend the specific class to be surveyed on their perception on tourism impact on their domestic economy. In the case of Spain, students were asked to answer having in mind their preferred sun and sea destination during their summer holidays. This was done so the responses in Madrid would be provided based on the most similar scenario as the one of their counterparts in Croatia: given that the Faculty of Tourism in Opatija is located by the sea while the Faculty of Commerce and Tourism in Madrid is placed in an urban city, where urban tourism and cultural tourism prevail. The goal was to minimize the item bias derived from similar respondents responding to different tourism impacts because of taking into account different types of tourism (urban and/or cultural versus sun & sea). There are many examples in the questionnaire where not having fixed this premise, the item would have introduced bias and jeopardized the comparison between our two samples. For example in question 14, when respondents were asked if local people were changing occupations and were increasingly oriented towards tourism-related jobs or in question 11 when asked if tourism has increased the amount of rubbish in the streets. In these two questions, it would have been less likely to totally or highly agree if based their responses in Madrid rather than in a coastal destination. The questionnaire, in English language, was administered to a random sample of college students at the end of their first year of University, during 2019. The Spanish Sample (hereafter “sample S”) includes 129 responses; out of which, 92 were female and 37 were male. In parallel, the questionnaire was passed to a sample of 148 College students in Opatija, Croatia (hereafter “Sample C”). In both samples college students were aged between 18-21 years old. Both administrators were the college students' own teachers, and as well part of the research team. Before passing the questionnaire, the translation into Spanish was provided in the case of Madrid to ensure the equivalence in cross-cultural research [20]. Moreover, students were informed that the answers would be treated anonymously and all individuals in the sample gave their consent to participate in the experiment. To contrast our hypotheses we employ the IBM SPSS Statistics software.

3. Results

3.1. Research Hypotheses

We believe there are differences on the attitude and on the perceptions on tourism socioeconomic and environmental impact of local residents based on nationality and to a lesser extent on gender. In particular, we cite our null hypotheses: a) There are no differences in the attitude of tourism college students towards tourism sustainability (economic, social, environmental dimension) based on nationality and/ or gender and b) The alternative hypothesis 1: There are differences in the attitude based on nationality plus c) the alternative hypothesis 2: There are differences in the attitude based on gender. Our preliminary analysis based on the frequency of the analysis agrees with the premise and state of the art while showing an overall supportive perception and attitude towards tourism development by both samples.

3.2. Tables and results

Table 1 shows the frequency distribution of the level of agreement on the 18 statements of the questionnaire. The ordinal variable was the level of agreement expressed by a five point-Likert scale. The grouping variable was the nationality of the respondents, Croatian and Spanish students.

Table 2 and Table 3 illustrate the frequencies expressed in percentages for questions 19, 20 and 21 respectively. However, questions 19 and 20 are dichotomous and 21 offers three response categories that refer to the level of positivity ranging from not at all positive, neither positive nor negative to positive. In Table 2 the distribution of frequencies tell us that Spaniards are quite aware of the fact of the threat of overbuilding and of exceeding the carrying capacity in the summer season. Spaniards apparently feel the pinch better of the pressure of the demand. By contrast, less than a fourth of the Croats seem to be concerned about such threats. This could be explained by the fact of the Croatian Travel and Tourism industry at a lower level of maturity than Spain’s T&T. In table 3, Spaniards show a relative more positive overall attitude towards tourism development than their Croatian counterparts.

Hereafter, table 4 displays the statistically significant results obtained by applying the non-parametric Mann Whitney U test to the data obtained from the sample under study in this research case. Specifically, we have chosen Mann Whitney U test for its appropriateness to test our null hypothesis on the differences in the responses given by the two independent groups we are analyzing, Croatian and Spanish students. Moreover, the contrast variable is an ordinal one.

Table 5 represents the statistically significant results obtained from the chi-square test, which allowed us to confirm the association between the two categorical variables analyzed, since we were able to reject our null hypothesis indicating the non-existence of any relationship between the two variables studied. The two contrasted variables are dichotomous. On the one hand, the variable response to questions 19 and 20 has two categories, yes and no. On the other hand, the grouping variable also has two categories, Croatian and Spanish nationality.

The statistical significant relationship between the variable attitude towards the development of tourism in the destination and the variable nationality is shown in Table 6, which reflects the results from the application of the nonparametric Mann Whitney U test.

Table 7 indicates the significant results obtained from the Mann Whitney U-statistic when the grouping variable is gender and the contrast variable, the level of agreement is an ordinal one.

Table 8 shows the median and the cumulative percentage in each of the categories of the level of agreement expressed by five points Likert scale and classified by nationality.

Table 9 illustrates the median as a measure of central tendency for female and male respondents and the cumulative percentage in each of the categories of the level of agreement expressed by five points Likert scale.

Table 10 presents the positive Rho correlation coefficient (but only for females) for questions 5 in which we ask students about the net benefit of tourism activity (benefits of tourism are greater than the negative aspects of tourism) and question 25 where students are being directly asked about their attitude towards the development of tourism in the destination. For female students there is a correlation between the perception of net benefits and their attitude towards tourism development but not for males.

5. Conclusions

In this study, our aim has been to contribute to the existing literature by measuring perceptions and attitudes towards tourism development of today’s tourism workforce representing two EU countries highly dependent on the tourism industry though at different levels of development and with different paces of growth rates: Spain and Croatia.

In the aftermath of covid 19 pandemic, tourism sustainability has emerged as a major concern for the world travel and tourism industry. We believe that understanding better EU workforce perceptions and attitudes towards tourism development is essential and very valuable for tourism sustainability management policies.

Because nationality is a significant variable, based on our evidence, we must make sure that national and subnational governments consider obtaining a greater knowledge of their own residents´ perceptions and spur a deeper involvement of their host communities in their tourism planning policies. Prior literature and empirical evidence on residents’ attitudes based on the hypothesis of the sector dependence would have predicted a relative more optimistic attitude in Croatia than in Spain given their higher dependence on the T&T industry and jobs plus a larger gap to its potential tourism output. However, our findings suggest that that is not so. Croats, while being less concerned of the demand pressure, measured by the risk of overbuilding and excess of carrying capacity, seem more aware of the negative impacts of tourism development than the Spaniards. Thus, in this paper we report that the country much more dependent on tourism activity and on tourism jobs, precisely the one which has grown more rapidly over the past decade, show a tourism workforce more reluctant to further tourism development.