Periphery resort tourism and tourist — resident stress: an example from Barbados

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Abstract
Discussions of the possibilities of stressful relationships between tourists and residents in periphery resorts have tended to point to the extreme likelihood of stress as a direct result of the nature of international tourism and differences between tourists and residents. In opposition to this interpretation, it is sometimes suggested that tourism can be an agent of modernization and inter-cultural goodwill. Both views are overstated. Using data from Barbados, it is argued and demonstrated that, in the intensely tourism-oriented countries of the periphery, the level of maturity of tourism in the resort and the pattern of spatial behaviour of tourists and residents provide a more fruitful assessment of the occurrence or non-occurrence of tourist-resident discord. Therefore a simple extrapolation from the general conditions of international mass tourism should be supplanted by an assessment of the conditions under which tourism has evolved and is practised in the resort country.