Tourist-Group Consideration in Tourism Carrying Capacity Assessment: a New Approach for Saint Martin’s Island, Bangladesh

Everything has a capacity that it can tolerate or afford, beyond which it cannot serve. Tourism development and management should also be based on the recognition of the limits of a destination. As a result, tourist destinations must have their carrying capacity assessed and managed accordingly with a view to protecting them from getting exploited. In assessing tourism carrying capacity of a particular destination, the formulae given by Cifuentes (1992) and recommended by IUCN (Ceballos-Lascuráin, 1996) are widely used around the world. The formulae recognize the ‘necessary distance between two tourists’ as a factor that affects tourist satisfaction; and thus, consider it in assessing physical carrying capacity (PCC) of a destination. But Tran Nghi et al. (2007) argue that, the necessary distance between two groups on a route, as well as distance between two people, affects tourist's comfort and should be considered when assessing tourism carrying capacity (TCC). Tran Nghi et al. (2007) tried to make some adjustments to the formulae and used some techniques to consider tourists as in separate groups- not as an individual in a mass. When it is about assessing carrying capacity of a trekking trail or walking route where tourists have to be in a line one behind another, carrying capacity can be calculated for group of tourists using this adjusted formula. But when it is about a beach or a park where tourists are not in queues or lines- rather scattered in the whole area, carrying capacity cannot be calculated based on tourist-group, -rather as a mass. To calculate TCC of such destinations (beach/park) a new technique is proposed and used on the basic formulae of Cifuentes in this study. This new technique is applied in calculating the TCC of the Saint Martin’s Island, the only coral island of Bangladesh, as a case study. Keywords: tourism carrying capacity (TCC), Cifuentes' methodology, tourist-group, Saint Martin’s Island