Sustainable tourism as a method of forming a tolerant society

Abstract

The article concentrates on potential capabilities for the development of sustainable tourism, as well as its role in the formation of tolerant social relations. The authors revealed the profound impact of sustainable and hike tourism on emergence of the phenomenon ‘new tourist’. They also offered the description of levels of tolerance and their influence on the sustainable tendencies in modern tourism. There is a growing trend for tourism in modern international community to act as a high-powered regulator of socio-cultural relations and, simultaneously, as the crucial factor of counteraction to that xenophobia. A head-on clash of local and foreign cultures, which is an integral part of the very notion of tourism, is not supposed to assume itself in highly extreme forms, with the air of predominance of any of them, moreover, to be based on national, racial, religious, linguistic or educational differences. To put the idea across more efficiently, the authors resorted to exploiting such useful tools as the analysis and synthesis methodology, as well as that of comparison and prognostics. What is produced in the outcome of this study is revealing and emphasizing the levels of tolerance, characterizing the uneasy interrelationships between the so-called ‘new’ tourists and local community. The research findings could find practical applications for designing of new tourist products and elaborating of new networks of footpaths for walking tours.