Communities throughout the world have grappled with the positive and negative impacts of tourism for years. Oregon State University’s (OSU) Sustainable Tourism Lab was created in 2021 to support such global destinations and help them pursue a sustainable path – inclusive of economic, community, and environmental perspectives. Our first step in this process has been to quantify how communities feel about tourism.

By conducting in-person and online surveys, focus groups, and interviews, we collected data from the US Pacific Northwest region, including Alaska, Hawaii, and the Northern Marianas Islands.

We hypothesize that there is a strong relationship between a destination’s lifecycle stage and its community’s sentiment level. We also hypothesize that community sentiment levels impact the community’s tourism carrying capacity. Once a destination’s community sentiment falls below neutral, the community acts—directly or indirectly—via political entities to reduce the carrying capacity of the area as a whole.