Correspondence: Timothy J, Tyrrell, School of Community Resources and Development, Arizona State University, 411 N. Central Ave., Suite 550, PhoenixAZ 85004-0690, USA. Tel: +1 602 496 0156; Fax: +1 602 496 0853; E-mail: timt@asu.edu

¹is Professor of tourism development and management in the School of Community Resources and Development, Arizona State University. Dr Tyrrell's areas of expertise are economic impact analysis, econometrics, and tourism economics.

²is Associate Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Associate Director of the Sea Grant College Program at the University of Connecticut. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association and the Marine Resource Economics Foundation. His areas of expertise include tourism economics, non-market valuation, land use, and marine resource economics.

Received 1 September 2007; Revised 1 September 2007; Published online 11 February 2008.

Abstract

This paper uses insights from a basic but formal model of tourism dynamics to frame a discussion of sustainability in tourism planning, with a particular focus on the role of dynamic resilience — or the ability of social, economic or ecological systems to recover from tourism-induced stress. The paper presents a theoretical approach to model resiliency in the ecological-environmental quality, economic-fiscal quality and social-cultural quality of tourist destinations. The model also formalises the difference between actual and perceived changes in these vectors. The specific goals of the paper are to characterise a more quantitative approach towards tourism sustainability and resilience, to summarise results in the tourism literature that might contribute to initial empirical implementation of such quantitative models, and to stimulate debate regarding the potential role of such approaches in guiding tourism policy.