Sustainable Tourism: Society & Environmental Aspects

Tourism is already one of the world's largest industries and it's still experiencing incredible growth. Of all the industries of major importance worldwide, Travel and Tourism directly contribute $1.4 trillion (U.S.) to the global economy. One out of ten of the world's total jobs are in travel and tourism and that number is growing.

Join this course if you want to learn where this growth is coming from and what the effects will be on the social and natural environment. Prepare yourself to be challenged with more critical reflections of an industry steeped in comfort and enjoyment.

You will also discover that tourism is more than just a powerful economic force. Tourism activities affect the environment of travel destinations and influence cultures worldwide. Tourism is very sensitive to global transformations such as changing consumer behaviour, economic developments, climate change, epidemics, or acts of terrorism. Tourism is in fact a complex phenomenon.

To explore the development of the tourism phenomenon and begin to build your own reflections on the industry, you'll be exposed to a variety of weekly insights throughout the online course. These include historical backgrounds, a variety of social science approaches, common theoretical constructs, related systemic observations, and exposure to environmental-, social- and economic implications of tourism.

Based on weekly writing exercises, you'll be challenged to form your own argument for a specific tourism development of your choice. You'll also help others in providing and receiving meaningful feedback on their critical reflections of tourism phenomena.

Join this MOOC if you want to explore tourism and understand what tourism does to our living environment, our behaviour and our cultural inheritance.

The effects of Covid-19 corona virus on the tourism industry

There is no doubt that the tourism industry is being affected by the Covid-19 corona virus outbreak. How will we recover, and will we fully recover? How does corona effects the tourists and their behaviour? And how can we pick up after this? How do we take it from here? Since it’s so relevant, we will address these questions in our Tourism MOOCs and make room for this on our discussion platform and case studies.