Sustainable Tourism: A Case Study on Salt Spring Island

Abstract

Over the past few decades, tourism has
become one of the mainstay industries for many
communities. Salt Spring Island, an island the
south of Vancouver Island, is no exception to the
benefits of tourism. Sustainable tourism is a
necessary and useful pattern to Salt Spring Island.
Under this perspective, there are some challenges
that exist on Salt Spring Island regarding the
tourism industry. Seasonality and inconvenient
transportation are the major challenges, for
seasonality will cause unstable revenue and underor
unemployment issues, which will affect
residents’ quality of life; the inconvenient
transportation will not only influence the locals’
daily life, but also reduce tourists’ interest in
travelling. The paper contains three sections: the
challenges that exist on Salt Spring Island tourism
industries, the measures are using on Salt Spring
Island, and innovative approaches from outside the
region to help Salt Spring Island to improve its
tourism development and sustainability. Despite
the local people’s efforts to come up with solutions
to the issues, these solutions cannot solve the
problems because these solutions do not address
the root of the problems. Therefore, the authors
suggest three innovations to solve these two
problems, including building greenways and
automatic rental bicycle system, creating a theme
for events, and developing wellness tourism.