Rural Community Prosperity Versus Tourism Progress: An Example of Sustainable Opportunities

Community-based tourism, as an evolving approach to sustainable tourism planning, aims to provide economic, social, cultural and environmental advantages to community members while enhancing sustainable principles at the local level. Integrating tourism activities, sustainability mechanisms, and the well-being of rural communities provides the focus for our work. We use a Serbian case study to showcase the link between rural community welfare and sustainable tourism development. An empirically estimated Tourism Impact Attitude Scale (TIAS) is analysed using factor analysis. Results suggest that the TIAS can be grouped into four factors that include (1) personal and community benefits of tourism, (2) negative tourism effects, (3) support for local tourism development and (4) general tourism perceptions. These four factors explained just over 41% of the variance. Furthermore, ANOVA results suggest that rural resident perceptions of tourism development are significantly different depending on employment in tourism-related jobs, average monthly incomes, and perceptions of community growth. This chapter reinforces the idea that the sensitivity to local resident perceptions plays a vital role in connecting community well-being with sustainable tourism development.