Discuss the limitations of Becken and Simmons' (2008) approach to Essay

Discuss the limitations of Becken and Simmons' (2008) approach to yield analysis AND discuss ways in which their model might be developed further - Essay Example In tourism, yield can mean the profit or revenue incurred from hosting the different visitor types. In order to achieve sustainable yield, three dimensions; social, economic and ecological yields need to be combined to a single yield measure (Becken and Simmons, 2008). This has been shown to be impossible as there is no suitable methodology to merge these yields. Becken and Simmons (2008) further explained that the research focused on the financial aspect in terms of yield to measure the private sector tourism yield. To calculate the financial yield, the researchers used individual sectors like hotels that the tourists visited and did not consider the financial impacts of tourism on the societies, nations or the environment. Tourism has both the public and private components and as such it is difficult to assess tourism sustainability. This represents a limitation as it this mix is complex and difficult to cumulatively assess (Becken and Simmons, 2008). The research used the transport and accommodation details of the visitors to identify the tourist types. The types that were identified as a result were; backpackers, campers, home visitors, free independent travelers and coachers. Out of these, the researchers were unable to determine the tourist types of 16% of the sample and as a result, they excluded this number from the database (Becken and Simmons, 2008). This percentage represents a significant number of tourists and is therefore a significant loss for the research. According to Becken and Simmons (2008), the research also focused on the emission of carbon dioxide gas or greenhouse gas emission as the ecological only impact of tourism. This is a limitation, as they needed to assess other environmental impacts of tourism like the impact of tourism on ecological resources like water and soil conservation. Tourism has economic, environmental and