Responding to changing resident attitudes toward tourism: Policy implications for strategic planning

For communities in a state of transition from resource commodity processing to tourism, understanding the social and environmental consequences of tourism is an important step in making informed decisions about the nature and level of tourism development. Since these effects may not occur until long after a tourism development policy is instituted, monitoring of effects, using attitude and other sources is important in identifying the extent to which goals are achieved. When monitoring identifies particularly significant trends, additional intensive study is warranted. In this report, we examine potential causes of changing attitudes toward tourism in Montana. The data suggest that increasingly negative attitudes toward tourism are explained in part by feelings that tourists are not paying their fair share of the public services needed by them.