Tourism growth vs. local challenges

Abstract

The amount of tourists visiting the Dutch flower bulb region is growing every year. The Keukenhof, one of the biggest tourist attractors in the region, already welcomed 1.5 million visitors in the eight week during flowering season in 2019, which is almost twice the visitor count of 10 years ago. Because of this growth, the local population’s day-to-day businesses become increasingly disrupted. The pressure of these disruptions is mostly felt in three sub-contexts: •The flower fields; tourists that trample flower bulbs while making pictures •Regional accessibility; tourists causing traffic congestions which burdens the local population that has to travel to or from Lisse •Retail shops in Lisse; reduced accessibility causing regional shoppers to avoid Lisse, leading to less revenue. The choice has been made to merely focus on the last of these three sub-contexts. Although tourism was found to be a burden for the retail shops of Lisse, quantitative and qualitative research showed not only temporary inaccessibility through tourism threatens the centre of Lisse, but also online shopping, attractiveness of city centres and vacant stores pose a threat. At this moment, the strengths of the centre of Lisse as a regional shopping area can no longer outweigh the pressure that comes with these threats. This causes the centre to slowly degrade, manifesting itself in an increasingly amount of vacancies and shop owners that do not feel motivated to collaborate and invest in the centre any more. To counter this effect of degradation, a transition should to be made where Lisse is no longer regarded as just a regional shopping area, but as a village centre that is rich with experiences and where it pays off to do effort for the centre by taking ownership. The value of ‘the centre’ stands or falls by the amount of stakeholders that feel that they are part of the whole and have a responsibility to that whole. If this is present, ‘the centre’ will provide experiences to the customers and a positive business climate to the shop owners. In this way, the whole becomes more than the sum of the individual parts. For implementation, it is important to put focus on the symbiotic relationship that exists between individual stakeholders and ‘the centre’. For the short term, the benefits of investing in experiences can be demonstrated through pilots in individual stores. Eventually, the long term goal is providing a richness in collaboratively made experiences that bind the whole of the centre together, making current threats insignificant while providing positive spill over effects for the local entrepreneurs and customers. Stakeholders that have a purpose in governing the region such as HLTsamen should take a role in facilitating and orchestrating the transition.