The social impacts of business travel and tourism

Social impacts are perhaps less visible or tangible than economic or environmental impacts, yet they are still very important.

Positive

• It can potentially provide interesting, relatively well-paid jobs for some people, notably women and young graduates

• It can help support infrastructure such as s hops, theatres, and transport facilities which are also used by locals

• It can be a motivator for many employees/business travellers

• It can bring new ideas in to the local business community

Negative

• In destinations where the business tourists tend to be richer than local people it can lead to resentment and a feeling of inferiority in the local people

• Moral issues are raised when public authorities can find money for a convention centre or airport for business tourists but not for schools and health care for local people

• Business travellers can help spread sexually transmitted diseases

• It can bring in business tourists who are insensitive and/or ignorant and offend local people

• Some business travellers may be involved in dubious, or even illegal activities, such as smuggling

• Affluent business tourists can attract all types of criminals particularly muggers

• Frequent business travellers can suffer stress from concerns over delays, missed connections, lost baggage and so on

There is no doubt that business travel has the potential to cause social, economic and environmental problems, often through ignorance or insensitivity.

Towards a cost-benefit analysis of business travel and tourism it is impossible to say “it has only positive or negative impacts”. Interestingly, this is not possible for two main reasons, notably:

1 Little reliable empirical research has been published on the impact of business travel and tourism. The industry produces data on the economic impact which it feels shows it in a positive light. However, it does not seem to try to collect information on social and environmental impacts which it may fear could be less positive. Academic researchers have devoted little effort, as yet, to studying the impacts of business tourism, whereas they have carried out a huge volume of research on the impacts of leisure tourism. In any event, given the complexity of the sector it would be very difficult to measure the impacts fairly.

2 Not everyone is affected equally by business travel and tourism. There are big winners such as hotels and the owners of successful conference production companies and smaller winners such as the low-paid operational staff in the service delivery side of the industry. There may even be overall losers, such as the residents in a coastal resort, not employed in business tourism, where local councils have invested millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money in a new convention centre.

Nevertheless, overall, the general belief appears to be that business travel and tourism has the following impacts:

Economic – positive.

Environmental – negative.

Social – mixed. Generally positive for the business traveller; more negative for the local community in the destination.

However the question of whether business travel and tourism has negative or positive impacts is difficult to judge because the nature and scale of the impacts varies between:

• different types of business travel and tourism

• different sectors of the business tourism industry

• different types of business tourism destinations.