Paper short abstract:

To better understand the social ecology of tourism, the input advocates a regional history perspective. Two hundred years of tourism development in the alpine region of Salzburg (Austria) allow to evaluate past and explore new pathways of tourism in terms of their (non-)sustainability.

Paper long abstract:

To understand tourism as a phenomenon of high socioecological impact, a regional perspective is helpful. Using the example of the Austrian state of Salzburg, I want to introduce a case study as an input to the roundtable, which outlines the different historical development paths of tourism in the region and questions them in the historical retrospective on their socio-ecological (non-)sustainability. Tracing two hundred years of development offers a broad range of evidence both for urban and rural tourism in the alpine region. While Salzburg city is listed as UNESCO World Heritage Site and specializes in high quality culture tourism the city faces a bundle of problems also known for other tourism hot spots: ‘overtourism’ by daily visitors, ‘airbnbfication’ and the connected problems for permanent residents to access affordable housing etc. The alpine countryside hosts other forms of tourism and therefore faces other sustainability problems: Travellers mainly arrive by individual car traffic, causing a high carbon footprint and demanding for elaborate infrastructure (streets, parking grounds etc.) even in fragile high alpine surroundings. Also wintertourism is responsible for the development and maintenance of an ever more complex infrastructure, while climate change threatens ever more ski resorts in their operation. In the discussion this account provides a basis for evaluating past development pathways of tourism and explore potentially more sustainable new ones.