Barriers to implementing Sustainable Tourism Policy in Mass Tourism Destinations

The focus of this paper is on identifying the barriers to successful implementation of sustainable tourism policy. The research used exploratory and descriptive approaches to identify barriers from the literature as well as field research to determine perceived barriers from key respondents in two specific locations in the Mediterranean- Malta and Calviá. The research found that although respondents were aware of sustainable tourism, the individual advantage from exploiting shared pooled or shared resources is often perceived as being greater than the potential long-term shared losses that result from the deterioration of such resources, which means that there is little motivation for individual actors (whether governments, elected officials, or individual operators), to invest or engage in protection or conservation for more sustainable tourism.