Hi everyone!

In our last post, we covered indoor air pollution, a rather insidious form of pollution that we might not be aware of when we are exposed to it. However, once tourists like you and I become aware of air pollution in our desired tourist destination, what happens?

Sketchy photos

Well, for one, we might simply choose to skip the original tourist destination in mind. This was interestingly the case observed at Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan, a popular tourist destination marketed as one of the must-see places within the region. More specifically, the days in which there was ‘bad air’ – found to have been mainly caused by carbon emissions from the nearby Taichung Power Plant – were associated with a drop in tourist numbers of 25,725 people (Chen et al., 2017), a considerably large amount of people.

The significance of the drop was perhaps due to the fact that the nature of the activities around the lake are outdoors-related i.e. walking around the Scenic Area and taking photos, meaning that air pollution would simply ruin the entire experience. In fact, not only has Sun Moon Lake been discussed in academia through articles like the one mentioned above, it has somewhat garnered a reputation for actually being smoggy! Take a look at a Lonely Planet forum here.

Sketchy people?

Choosing to skip the destination seems like an intuitive response to air pollution, but what occurs in our heads when we knowingly find ourselves in the middle of it? Believe it or not, not only do we feel physically uncomfortable, we actually subconsciously become more distrustful of the people around us.

In an extremely thought-provoking paper, Zhang et al. (2019) investigated the psychological impacts of air pollution on tourists and found out that tourists’ mindsets towards others become more pessimistic – and thus more suspicious of parties like tourism service providers – when in a polluted context without even being aware of it. Such a finding has important ramifications: it means that while air pollution might make us consciously uncomfortable in the environment and harm our respiratory health, it could also very well be ruining our supposed ‘pleasure trips’ on a more subconscious level.

Given the above examples of how air pollution adversely affects tourism, it is then a no-brainer for municipal authorities and governments to try and ameliorate air pollution – not only for general public health, but also for the coveted tourist dollar.

—

References

Chen et al. 2017, ‘Does air pollution drive away tourists? A case study of the Sun Moon Lake National Scenic Area, Taiwan’, Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, vol. 53, pp. 398-402, doi: https://doi-org.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/10.1016/j.trd.2017.04.028

Zhang et al., 2019, ‘Tourists and air pollution: how and why air pollution magnifies tourists’ suspicion of service providers’, Journal of Travel Research, pp. 1-13, doi: https://www.researchgate.net/deref/https%3A%2F%2Fdoi.org%2F10.1177%2F0047287519859710