Rating the Tourist

The sign may say WELCOME TO QUAINTSVILLE, but the real message may be GO SOMEWHERE ELSE. That, at least, is what many tourists are beginning to suspect as they get the cold shoulder from communities. The locals are increasingly questioning the assumption that hordes of visitors automatically mean progress and prosperity--and they may be right.

After three postwar decades of headlong tourist development, a number of states from Oregon to Maine have reappraised the actual near-and long-term value of tourism in ecological, social and economic terms. Using a kind of restaurant-rating system in reverse, the consulting firm of Arthur D. Little Inc., for example, conducted a study for the state of Maine. The study rated the social and environmental impact of various types of tourists by measuring them on a scale of minus one (for least damaging) to minus five for each of a dozen criteria, and comparing the total with the vacationers' average expenditure per tourist day. Topping the list, in terms of least environmental and social intrusion, are conventioneers (minus 20) and business visitors (minus 24); the two classes of visitors also spent the most money (business, $25.10 per tourist per day; conventioneers, $23.80). At the bottom on both scores are campers, with a minus-45 environmental-social rating and expenditures of only $10.30 daily. In between are skiers and sightseers (minus 31 and minus 33) and, lower still, snowmobilers and saltwater boaters (minus 35 and minus 41).

A study of tourism in Maryland, also prepared by Little, shows that visitors who stay in hotels or motels on the state's popular Eastern Shore not only spend four times as much as campers but also generate six times more jobs, seven times more income and over five times as much tax revenue for the area. Using these and similar studies, state and community planners hope to devise strategies for balanced tourist growth. Rather than employ scattershot advertising, such as Maine billboards with the inane slogan LOVER COME BACK TO ME, for example, many states could emphasize such qualities as clean air and uncrowded roads. They could also take the strain off overcrowded, ecologically fragile coastal resources by developing and promoting relatively unspoiled inland areas. "Tourism has been profitable to Maine," the Little study concludes. "But if it means public resentment and decline in the quality of life, the price is too high."

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