26 USING VISUAL RESEARCH IN TOURISM – Contributions by Margarida Custódio Santos
26 USING VISUAL RESEARCH IN TOURISM – Contributions by Margarida Custódio Santos
Deciding to use visual research in my doctoral thesis was a difficult decision, but I felt that it was an inevitability rather than a choice. I started working on my thesis in 2008, and, after a long period of reading and reviewing the existing research on destination competitiveness, I concluded that which factors influence tourism destinations’ ability to compete depends on their development phase. The tourism destination where I live and work, the Algarve, is in a mature phase, so naturally my research focused on understanding the variables that affect mature tourism destinations’ competitiveness.
A quite significant number of studies have identified environmental impacts as one of the main factors that can cause mature destinations to become less competitive. A closer look at prior research revealed that many so-called environmental impacts comprised deterioration in the aesthetic quality of these destinations’ cultural landscape. I had found my research topic! However, I quickly recognised that, to measure tourism development’s effect on the Algarve landscape’s aesthetic quality, I needed to use images. At that time, few investigations had used photographs to assess tourism destinations’ aesthetic value.
Using still images to evaluate this industry’s impact on my destination’s aesthetic value was a major challenge. First, I needed to establish which activities’ effect on the cultural landscape’s aesthetic quality could be attributed to tourism development. An extensive literature review identified 11 factors including, among others, overdevelopment, new access roads, abandoned agricultural land, discarded old infrastructure, agricultural land converted to serve diverse tourism purposes and environmental degradation.
Next, photographs chosen to represent these impacts were mixed with manipulated images and shown to tourists who had already seen the Algarve’s landscape first hand. They were asked how likely they would be to choose a destination with landscapes like those in the photographs. Figure 1 shows a real cultural landscape that all tourists arriving at Faro International Airport are exposed to and depicts abandoned agricultural land. Figure 2 is of a manipulated landscape from which all signs of abandonment had been eliminated, but it is the same basic landscape.
Based on this survey, the following contribution was formulated:
Assessments of tourism destinations’ cultural landscape should be included when they are in a mature development phase in order to analyse their competitiveness.
As mentioned previously, the literature review carried out revealed that many situations reported as environmental impacts on destinations were changes in cultural landscapes’ aesthetic quality caused by tourism development. This conclusion was reinforced by authors who reported that environmental effects, such as contaminated bathing water due to inadequate sewage treatment