Chapter | The Oxford Handbook of Luxury Business | 2020

Luxury Tourism and Environmentalism

by G. Jones

Abstract

This chapter examines the evolution of luxury tourism and its environmental impact. Whilst mass tourism is widely seen as environmentally damaging, the impact of luxury tourism is nuanced. During the first stage of the growth in the nineteenth century, the numbers of people involved were small, and some companies understood the need to conserve the environment. Later, luxury hunting and fishing decimated wildlife populations, but the sector produced visionaries who created the concept of photographic safaris. Environmental education became a major theme of the luxury tourism firms. More recently, there has been a proliferation of ecotourism ventures, whilst conventional luxury hotel chains have pursued sustainability certification. Yet scaling has expanded environment footprints, whilst the embrace of the rhetoric of sustainability has degraded the meaning of the concept.

Keywords: luxury; luxury consumption; environmentalism; tourism; Green Business; History; Ethics; Globalization; Environmental Management; Business History; Tourism Industry; Antarctica; Latin America; North and Central America; Europe; Switzerland; Chile; Costa Rica; Africa; Kenya;

Format: Electronic Register to Read

Citation:

Jones, G. "Luxury Tourism and Environmentalism." Chap. 31 in The Oxford Handbook of Luxury Business, edited by Pierre-Yves Donzé, Véronique Pouillard, and Joanne Roberts. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020. Electronic.

About the Author

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Geoffrey G. Jones
Isidor Straus Professor of Business History
General Management

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