Tourism-Induced Resilience of Rural Destinations in Relation to Spatial Accessibility

Abstract

Tourism plays a vital role in many rural areas and has been proven a highly resilient sector following an unforeseen shock. Recent evidence points out its capacity to transfer resilient proprieties to the economic landscape of destinations. Yet, little is known about the way structural features of a destination impacts the tourism-induced resilience. Our study builds a mediation model for tourism-based economic resilience of rural destinations in relation to the accessibility towards urban areas. The results suggest that the accessibility towards the larger cities does not have a measurable effect upon the tourism-induced resilience. However, when the accessibility index took into consideration the medium cities and towns, a clear, distinguishable, effect was observed but only for time-distances up to 76 min. Therefore, we were able to map all rural areas that could benefit in a recovery period from their proximity from a city. The study increases our understanding of cone-like relationship model in tourism studies and completed previous approaches which established a relation between tourism growth and economic growth. Moreover, it confirms the role that accessibility plays during the recovery period and the contributions of tourism activities to strengthening the urban-rural synergies. Several policy recommendations regarding an integrated and efficient destination management are addressed at the end of the paper.

Keywords: Accessibility; Mediation model; Resilience; Rural tourism; Urban–rural relations.

Fig. 1

The representation of the areas where the effect of accessibility is significant